


Trading Mistakes (You've Got Scars As Deep as Mine)

by QuoteIntangible



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco
Genre: Bullying, Child Abuse, Drug Use, Gen, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Massive amounts of Hurt/Comfort, Non-Linear Narrative, Scenes from the Cabin, Self-Destructive Behavior, Self-Harm Tendencies Kind Of, Semi-Graphic Descriptions on All of the Above, Swearing, Use of Derogatory Terms, Violence, car crashes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-03
Updated: 2015-11-22
Packaged: 2018-04-24 14:31:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 5
Words: 32,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4923208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuoteIntangible/pseuds/QuoteIntangible
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Later, when they could talk about it without one of the kids of Panic breaking down crying or violently flinching and strenuously avoiding everyone to the point of hiding for the rest of the day, they would blame Joe for everything. It was his weed laced with some shit no one still had any clue what, and his idea that started it. Pete and Patrick were the actual masterminds behind the plan, and it was their carefully thought out words, and cautious prodding that had Brendon sobbing and admitting his deepest, darkest secret. Though admittedly, no one could have known the tragic secret Brendon was keeping from them.</p><p>The rest of Panic followed suit, dredging up their most painful memories from the dark abysses within themselves bound tightly in violence and pain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Set Up

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: None of this is true and no harm was intended and I've never met any of these people.

Later, when they could talk about it without one of the kids of Panic breaking down crying or violently flinching and strenuously avoiding everyone to the point of hiding for the rest of the day, they would blame Joe for everything. It was his weed laced with some shit no one still had any clue what, and his idea that started it. Pete and Patrick were the actual masterminds behind the plan, and it was their carefully thought out words, and cautious prodding that had Brendon sobbing and admitting his deepest, darkest secret to the seven of them that made up Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco. Though admittedly, no one could have known the tragic secret Brendon was keeping from them.

The rest of Panic –high on mystery weed laced with what they now believed was the devil’s jizz–followed suit, dredging up their most painful memories from the dark abysses within themselves bound tightly in violence and pain. They were just kids, Pete thought, not yet adults when he signed the three of them and even Jon was barely an adult now. They were far too young to have experienced this kind of pain.

But finally admitting the truth out loud to friends who actually gave a shit was the push they all needed to get help and move on.

So maybe Pete would take some credit after all.

* * *

“I’m not sure if it’s cute or pathetic how much in love with Brendon Spencer is,” Patrick announced to the dressing room one day. He’d been staring absentmindedly at the wall for a while now, while Panic played on stage. Pete thought he was just getting in the zone. It wasn’t unusual for Patrick. 

They were currently on tour with Panic and while touring with the kids was a blast and they loved them like little brothers, even Jon and his acerbic humor and Ryan’s biting tongue, Spencer’s massive crush –obvious to everyone, but Brendon –was an amusing, but still incredibly depressing train wreck to watch.

“It’s disgusting,” Joe agreed, flopping down on the couch as he opened up a beer, only to change his mind and toss it. Joe was kind of a restless pacer before shows. “We should do something about it.”

“This ain’t high school, fuck face. We’re not gonna pass love notes across the aisle,” Pete said, really only protesting because it was Joe who came up with the idea. Joe tended to have an ulterior motive when it came to ‘helping’ other people, the kind of motive that would benefit only him in the end. Either that, or he just wanted to start shit and sit back and watch the drama unfold. 

Joe threw a mostly empty can of soda at Pete. “I say we get them high or super drunk and then get them to admit their gay love for each other.”

“That sounds like a bad idea,” Andy piped up. Joe turned to glare at him. “They don’t really drink.”

“It’s a terrible idea,” Patrick agreed, “and Brendon is kind of weird about uh, certain unwanted attention," he delicately added.

Joe murmured and shrugged his shoulders, but didn’t deny it. The kid, because Pete couldn’t wrap his mind around Brendon being anything but, yet, possessed no qualms about invading another man’s personal space and full on attached himself like an octopus to Pete the first time Brendon stayed at his apartment while recording vocals for one of their records. He also had no problem whatsoever kissing another man on the cheek or flat out making out, tongue and all, with another man. He even admitted to being bisexual, on several occasions. But if another man showed honest to God interest in Brendon, like 'I want to fuck you stupid' interest, Brendon got really weird and really freaked, refusing to be in the same room as the person alone and barely stuttering out responses to other people when the person was around. Pete only heard rumors about it, and no one would give him a straight answer to confirm, but the gossip vine at FBR said one of the opening acts for Panic had to fire a tech in the middle of the tour because he aggressively hit on Brendon and the leader singer had a meltdown. It was the main reason for the depressing part of Spencer’s epic crush on Brendon, and kind of disturbing at the same time.

He didn’t think Brendon was lying about being bisexual. If he was, he doubted the kid would stick his tongue down another man’s throat even if he knew for sure the other man was straight. And he was fairly certain that Brendon felt something in return for Spencer. Maybe not the epic gay crush Spencer harbored, but the way Brendon gravitated to Spencer in stressful situations, the way his hugs lingered longer, and how he always chose Spencer to cuddle with first, and constantly turned to Spencer before answering during interviews, spoke of something more than platonic love. He chalked the weirdness up to Brendon being raised Mormon and hoped the kid grew out of it as he got older.

How he was supposed to know the truth was something like a scene out of a snuff film?

“All the more reason to get them high,” Joe insisted. “Then we can find out why the kid does that, get him to see his big gay love for Spencer and be the best match makers ever. I know just the type of weed we need for this,” he said and sprang to his feet, on the phone with his dealer and out of the bus before anyone could stop him.

Joe triumphantly pranced onto the bus two days later with a giant bag of weed labeled ‘guaranteed to make you spill your guts.’ Pete thought that might have meant literally. But, Patrick and him had been unable to let go of the idea of setting up Brendon and Spencer after Joe brought it up. They spent the last two days formulating a ‘hypothetical’ plan on how to make it happen. Then a stage manager hardcore hit on Brendon in Pittsburgh freaking the kid the fuck out, and pissing Spencer off, and they decided it was too good of an opportunity to pass up, especially now that Joe had the weed.

So that is how they found themselves with four incredibly high kids, who weren’t even old enough to drink yet, with the exception of Jon, laughing and barely able to see straight, and he thinks, in Jon’s case, seeing hallucinations because he kept talking to someone who wasn’t actually there. And then Pete realized Jon was talking to his cats like he could see them.

They didn’t have to go through with it. Patrick and Pete didn’t have to spend hours scheming on the best way to get those two idiot kids to open up.  They also didn’t have to manhandle a drugged out Brendon between them on the floor of their tour bus so he could neither escape when they finally brought up the subject or, alternatively, they could protect him if things blew up between him and Spencer, who was sitting in between Andy and Joe, also intentional, on the couch opposite from them.

And Pete definitely didn’t have to say, “I think Gary, you know the stage manager at the last venue, had a massive boner for you dude. That guy seriously wanted to fuck the shit out you. He couldn’t stop staring at your ass the entire time.” Which was true. Zach glued himself to Brendon’s side the entire time, because the dude gave off serious creeper vibes. Brendon let Zack cling, meaning he knew exactly what the fuck was going on.

Brendon paled, wrung his hands in his lap and mumbled something that sounded vaguely like ‘not interested’ while looking like he wanted to puke. He shrugged the hand off that Pete placed on his shoulder and really, that was the big fucking red flag they all missed declaring their entrance into dangerous waters.

“Why not?” Spencer, bold with the mystery weed afire in his veins, asked. “He was pretty fucking hot, and really into you.” If Spencer was going for casual, he spectacularly failed. But Brendon was too busy shaking and looking nervous to notice.

“You wouldn’t leave Zack’s side,” Patrick pushed, trying to make it sound like a joke. He was a terrible actor, that one, but Pete still loved him. “Like you were afraid he was gonna jump your bones any second.”

The color drained from Brendon’s face and he made a distressed noise that caught in the back of his throat. “I just didn’t want to, okay?”

“Is there someone else?” Andy said, wagging his eyebrows in a vain attempt to cut through the building tension and stop this train from careening off the tracks. Joe leaned back and smirked. This is exactly what the fucker wanted. Bastard.

“N-No,” Brendon stuttered. “He was just…” Brendon trailed off as he his whole body started trembling, which was the red flag number two that everyone completely ignored.

 “What’s wrong, B? Was it because he’s a guy?” Pete asked. “Remember, I was there when you made out with, what’s his name? Your tongue was down his fucking throat, so I don’t think you’re lying about being bisexual. Why do you always turn every guy down?”

“Yeah, what the actual fuck, Brendon?” Spencer said and rolled his eyes, but there was definite venom behind his words.

“We’re your friends, Brendon. Whatever it is, you can tell us. We promise not to judge. Right guys?” Patrick said, giving each of them a stern look. His eyes softened when they fell on Brendon’s bent head, concern radiating from his baby blues.

There a chorus of ‘yeahs’ and everyone nodded their heads, even though Brendon couldn’t see them because his eyes were fixed on his lap. “It’s just,” Brendon said, and Pete held his breath. Here it was, the question that nagged at him for months finally being answered. “It’s just that, the first and only time I had sex with another guy, it was the worst moment of my life. And I don’t mean the worst sex of my life, I mean the worst fucking thing that’s ever happened to me.”

And holy shit those were tears in Brendon’s eyes that were spilling over onto his cheeks. Brendon threw his glasses on the ground and angrily scrubbed at his eyes, before giving up and burying his face in his hands.

“What happened, Bren?” Ryan asked in a voice that was too soft and devoid of sarcasm to belong to the Ryan Ross Pete knew.

Brendon whimpered and shook his head as he hunched his shoulders and tried to curl into as small of a ball as possible.

Jon shared a look with Ryan, who shook his head slightly, sending a silent message. Whatever the message was, Jon understood it, and he swallowed hard. “B, what happened?” Jon asked this time with forced calm, and yeah Pete was definitely missing something here.

“I was 15,” Brendon started, and then shook his head and mumbled, “it doesn’t matter.”

Andy hissed loudly, his hands clenching at the fabric of his jeans. Apparently he figured out the message too.  

“You can do this, okay? And we’re gonna sit here and listen and not judge, just like Patrick said,” Jon said, and Pete felt his heart jolt. How did this conversation spiral so far out of his control? “Okay?”

Brendon looked around the room, at each person clustered curiously around him and nodded before staring at his lap again. “I uh, I was invited to this party by some of the other kids in jazz band,” Brendon said, pulling his knees to his chest. “They said it was just going to be a small get together, but you know how that goes.  I think half the school was there. I didn’t drink because, you know my Mom would never let me sleep over at anyone else’s place and I wasn’t about to go home drunk. I mean high is one thing and….yeah. So I wasn’t drunk. It…it wasn’t that.

“Anyways, I got separated from the kids who invited me and I didn’t really have any other friends. So when the captain of the soccer team came up to me and started hitting on me, I went for it. I mean, he was good looking and I always kind of knew I was into guys as much as I was into girls. He asked me if I wanted to go back to his car to make out, and I didn’t even think twice about it. I shouldn’t have gone with him, I shouldn’t… but I’d never kissed a guy before and he was good looking and I thought…”

He hears Joe suck in a sharp, noisy breath. This was his idea, but the look on his face screamed regret. To his left Jon and Ryan were trying to disappear into each other, hands clutched tight in the fabric of the other’s clothing until knuckles turned white. The look on Andy’s face was a forced neutral, the look he usually only pulled out when the band started fighting or when he was trying to deal with annoying interviewers on no sleep. Pete took comfort in the fact that Spencer and Patrick looked just as confused as he felt.

“I thought we were just going to make out. I mean I’d never done anything with a guy before and if I’d known, I wouldn’t have gone I swear. I wouldn’t have agreed to go with him.” Brendon’s started shaking harder as he pressed the heel of his hands into his eyes as if that could make him stop.

Pete felt something slither and slide around his stomach until it settled low in his gut, leaving an ache like he needed to vomit. “What did he do?” Ryan asks as if saying the words quietly enough maybe they wouldn’t be heard, or maybe it would soften the blow to come.

It doesn’t.

“He forced himself on me. I didn’t want to, and I tried to get away, I swear. I was stupid, so stupid. If I just hadn’t gone with him,” he shook his head and pulled his knees tighter to his chest. “He kept, he kept saying that I agreed to do this, that he knew that I wanted it. And I didn’t want to, I didn’t, but I was the one who went with him, and it’s all my fucking fault. I’m so fucking stupid.”

A harsh silence settled on the room sneaking away into each tiny corner of the bus and draping across their shoulders like weights. Brendon’s crying, muffled by the hoodie and his hands smashed into his face, pierced the silence like a knife.  “It hurt, it hurt so fucking bad,” he whispered, but still no one moved.

Pete expected there was a reason Brendon feared the idea of doing anything more than kissing another dude. High on his list was ‘repressed Mormon taught being gay was a sin his whole life and unable to repress the programmed repulsion’ and low on the list being ‘not as bisexual as he claims.’ Not once, not even in the darkest recess of his brain that had seen first-hand the kind of horrors lurking on the streets, did he ever think rape. Not Brendon, not the bright, optimistic kid he’d come to think of as his younger brother.

Did he…what the fuck did he do?

“I’m sorry,” Brendon said, the words pressed into the sleeve of his hoodie. He trapped a sob behind tightly clenched teeth, before he wrapped his arms around himself. The effort to compose himself was not lost on Pete. “I’ve never cried about this before, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Pete had half a second to be confused before Joe jumped to his feet. With hands fisted into the lapels of Brendon’s hoodie, he pulled the kid to his feet. Before Pete could launch himself to his feet to intervene, Patrick and Andy tense and ready to do the same, Joe, the man with an appearance like jagged glass and a heart to match, pulled Brendon to his chest and hugged him.

“You don’t get to feel guilty about this, kid,” he said in a staccato voice that beat against their eardrums. “What happened isn’t your fault, and you’re allowed to cry. You’re allowed to cry about this.”

Pete’s pretty fucking sure some invisible person snuck onto the bus in that moment and kicked him in the chest. “Oh, oh Brendon,” he heard Patrick say as the pieces clicked into place for him too.  With the arm around Brendon’s back, Joe squeezed the kid to his chest and then let go just as quickly before depositing him back in between Patrick and Pete. “You’re better at the cuddling and shit,” he mumbled as he sat back down next to Andy and Spencer.

Brendon just sat there, hands clenching and unclenching by his sides, looking so lost and confused as he desperately tried to hold back his sobs. He pushed at Brendon’s shoulders until the kid faced him. When brown eyes slid up to meet his, the invisible man kicked Pete in the chest again hard and right over his heart, which protested by beating hard enough to hurt. He pulled Brendon into his arms, and finally, finally, the kid let go and cried.

*

Ryan remembered the signs that his father blacked out again, the only times his father ever hit him. His father would stagger home, fists clenched and speech too slurred to understand. But it was the wild look of a feral beast in his eyes that always tipped Ryan off.

Sometimes Ryan liked to take advantage of it.

It would take just one tiny push to get his father swinging those fists. But tonight Ryan wanted it to hurt, he wanted to bleed. He wanted to feel. So he went for gold.

“Mom never loved you.”

He wasn’t surprised when his father took his belt off, nor was he surprised when it whipped across his back with a snap of leather.

“You’re the reason she left.”

The tension in his shoulders drained as the belt came down again, the tightness in his chest loosening.

This was what he wanted, he told himself.

His father dropped the belt and turned to leave, but was not enough for Ryan. So he tried something he's never said before.

“I never loved you either. I wish you were dead.”

His father wrapped his fingers around his throat, slamming him into the counter. His head bounced off the cupboards with a dull _thwack._

Ryan didn’t fight it. As his vision turned spotty and the worn yellow wallpaper of his kitchen started fading around the edges, he wondered if this time his father really would kill him. He felt no fear, though.

Only relief.

He remembered crawling into Spencer’s room in the middle of the night after he came to on the kitchen floor. He nearly stumbled back out of the open window when he almost stepped on Brendon camped out on the floor.

The shadows slithered across the blankets as Brendon slid around to face him.

Ryan was tired and bruised and not in the mood for Brendon’s naivety, not after he goaded his father into hitting him, pushed him so far that Ryan thought, just for a moment, that the drunk was actually going to kill him.

The bruises on his back and face and around his neck throbbed as Brendon studied him silently in the dark, his eyes far more understanding then he ever would have given the younger teen credit for before this moment. Then Brendon lifted the edge of his blanket and scooted over on the air mattress.

Part of him wanted only Spencer in that moment, but the rest of him knew anyone would do. So he slid in next to Brendon, body stiff next to his, but Ryan still buried his face in the younger teen’s shoulder.

“Tell me,” Brendon said

“Sometimes my father hits me,” he said, because there was no pretending Brendon didn’t know exactly where the bruises came from.

Brendon wrapped an arm loosely around his shoulders and pulled Ryan closer. “It’s not your fault,” Brendon said.

He didn't believe that, he really didn’t. He knew exactly what to say to make his father hit him, and no one forced him to say those things, but… “I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t force my mother to leave and not take me with her. I didn’t make my father drink. I didn’t want this.”

“No, you didn’t,” Brendon said in a voice far more mature than Ryan was used to hearing from him. It was a voice speaking from experience. Ryan waited for him to say more, to share his experience after he just poured his heart out to the teen.

But he never did and Ryan let it go.

It wasn't until they were on their first tour that he got his second clue that maybe Brendon had a secret like Ryan hiding somewhere within, slithering stealthily around like a snake in murky water so no one could find it.

It happened because Brent was being a douche again. He showed up for their concert drunk again –Ryan was going to murder whoever gave him the alcohol –and stumbled his way through their performance. It was bad enough they had to dumb down the parts for the idiot because he wasn’t good enough to play like Brendon did while recording the CD, and it was bad enough that he didn’t write a single part of the record, not one lyric, or chorus, or bass line, nothing. But now this? It’s almost the straw that broke the camel’s back.

They had no choice but to be stuck in his presence in the tiny van they were touring in as they rode to their next venue with a still drunk Brent. That night, Brent decided he needed to share all of his hysterical stories from high school. Except no one was laughing, but him.

“It was the worst moment of my life,” he somberly said after recounting some story of sneaking out to see his girlfriend and getting caught fooling around by her parents. “We didn’t even get to have sex, and I never saw her again.” Brent flailed around and kicked the back of Spencer’s seat for the sixth time. Spencer grit his teeth and clenched his hands on the steering wheel.

“Yeah, that sounds so terrible,” Brendon sarcastically said, rolling his eyes, pulling his blanket around him tighter and curling into the van door. Ryan agreed with him. Brent never had to hide from a drunken father, never had to clean his father’s vomit off the floor. He never had to go buy his own groceries, or make his own dinner and eat alone night after night because his father couldn’t even be bothered to come home at a decent time. He didn’t have to call 911 on Christmas when he was eleven because his father wouldn’t wake up.

Brent needed to shut his fucking face right now, but the only person that didn’t know that was him.

Brent scoffed and shoved Brendon’s shoulder. “What you would know about it, Urie?”  

“At least you had a choice,” Brendon mumbled, but everyone heard it.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

He heard Spencer’s teeth grinding together, knuckles turning white on the steering wheel. “Shut the fuck up, Brent, and go the fuck to sleep. Now!” Spencer never snapped, never. It surprised Brent enough that he kept his mouth shut. “And I swear to God if you show up to our next concert drunk, I will shove your shoes so far up your fucking ass you’ll be able to taste it.”

Brendon hid his laugh with a cough. Ryan beamed at his best friend in thanks for Spencer defending him. This was why they were best friends. Spencer had his own secrets to protect too, though, just like him, and they were far more terrifying than a parent walking in on them doing the nasty. They lurked like demons in the water, waiting for the perfect moment to drown them. If they could, they would trade with Brent in a heartbeat for his ‘worst moment of his life.’

Apparently Brendon had a few demons just like theirs, and with the way Spencer kept looking at Brendon through the rear view mirror, it wasn't just Ryan that knew.

But it was Ryan that couldn't let it go now. He knew he shouldn’t obsess about it, but something happened to Brendon, something terrible, and Ryan wanted to know what made Brendon just like him and Spencer.  

He watched for other signs, other clues, but there were none. Brendon was either over it, or really fucking good at hiding it, not like Ryan who still flinched when drunk people suddenly reached for him, or when Spencer jumped at sudden loud noises, like the backfire of a car.

He was watching Brendon as Jon, the tech from The Academy Is, taught him something on the bass guitar a few weeks later when, and with absolutely no control over what he was saying, he blurted out, “What _did_ you mean, when you told Brent at least he had a choice?”

Brendon sighed, staring down at the bass guitar in his hands, while Jon looked like a deer caught in the headlights. He didn’t think Brendon was going to answer, but he wasn't taking the question back, not saying ‘it’s okay if you don’t answer.’

Brendon’s shoulders slumped, but he said, “It’s just, the worst moment of my life, I was forced into doing something I didn’t want to.”

Ryan knew he wasn't getting a better answer than that, so he didn’t ask anymore. Jon nervously chuckled, but continued on in the lesson as if Ryan never interrupted them. Denial -he knew a negative coping method when he saw one – and he realized Jon was like them too. They weren't friends, though. It wasn't his place to ask. 

But he did know Brendon well enough and he wanted to know why Brendon didn’t have anything like that, a remnant left from a haunting past. Then some guy – a friend of a friend of a friend of one of the other opening acts - asked Brendon if he wanted to get out of there and go back to his place after the show, and Brendon…freaked the fuck out, for lack of a better term. He locked himself in the bathroom for hours and came out with just enough time to do his makeup and put on his stage outfit before he had to be on stage. Brendon refused to be in the same room with the guy alone after that and wouldn’t talk to him either.  It was even worse when a tech for the band opening for them the next tour made the same mistake and Brendon acted like the guy was diseased. They had to do a whole tour with the dude. It was awkward.

But Ryan didn’t get it. He had several pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but he didn’t have the box they came in, so he didn’t know what the picture was supposed to look like.

Until now.

“It’s just that, the first and only time I had sex with another guy, it was the worst moment of my life. And I don’t mean the worst sex of my life, I mean the worst fucking thing that’s ever happened to me,” he heard Brendon say. The pieces slammed together hard, and yeah, he fucking got it, got exactly what Brendon was not saying.

It left a bitter taste in his mouth.

He shared a look with Jon, because Jon was there that night too and, yeah, Jon’s eyes are wide. He got it, too.

But Spencer didn’t. The look on Spencer’s face bordered on anger and he was so caught up in jealously, because of his massive crush on Brendon, and confusion that he just didn’t get it.

Ryan was a good friend, though. And because he was a good friend and he wanted to see Spencer and Brendon hook up, even if the thought made him gag, and Brendon wouldn’t say anymore unless pushed,  Ryan asked, “What happened, Bren,” using the affectionate term her rarely called the younger teen.

Brendon whimpered and shook his head, shrugging his shoulders before looking away.

“B, what happened?” this time Jon asked.

And the story came tumbling out of him. If Ryan was honest with himself, he'd known for a while, but just didn’t want to admit something like that could happen to the seemingly always happy, but maybe not as innocent as he thought, teen. Now that his suspicions were confirmed, Ryan clutched at Jon like a lifeline.

Brendon sobbed in Pete and Patrick’s arms, and Ryan was not the nicest person in the world, far from it in fact, but he could do this one kind thing, couldn’t he? Ryan could make sure Brendon wasn’t alone in this right now, that Brendon wasn’t the center of attention the one time he didn’t want to be.

“My father used to hit me,” he blurted out, swallowing nervously when everyone’s, but Brendon’s, eyes turned to stare at him. “He was always drunk, but sometimes he’d black out and hit me with his fists, or with his belt.” He caught Jon’s eyes and the bassist nodded at him encouragingly. For once, he was doing the right thing.

“Sometimes when I was really depressed, I’d goad him into him. I’d scream and yell and say some horrible shit just to get him to hit me. But one night, he started choking me and he slammed my head into the wall. I started blacking out. I thought for sure he was going to kill me, but instead of being scared, I was…I was relieved.

“I still don’t know why I pushed him so much, why I tried so hard to make him hurt me. Maybe, I was hoping, for once he would come to senses and wouldn’t hit me. Or maybe I wanted him to realize what he was doing and stop drinking so much. Or maybe I just wanted the pain. I don’t know.”

Nobody said anything and he didn’t look away from Jon to see the pity on their faces. He nudgds Jon’s shoulder with his own before the silence could stretch on, because he was not going to be the only one showing support and Jon totally encouraged him to do this, so now it was definitely his turn. Solidarity, and band bonding, and all that shit.

Jon froze for a moment, and opened his mouth, but nothing came out.  Ryan narrowed his eyes and pressed his lips into a thin line. He didn’t want to hear what the others had to say, and he didn’t need their fucking opinion or advice or shit on his fucked up life. Jon needed to open his mouth now.

All for one and one for all, and yeah, all that crap.

Jon sighed in defeat.

*

Jon couldn’t forget the moment of the accident. There were moments after that were a bit hazy and complete parts he wasn’t even conscious for, but the exact moment the other car collided into his passenger door is something even drugs, and alcohol and probably dementia could not burn from his memories.

His license was shiny and new, having arrived just two days prior in the mail. It was enough time to forget everything driver’s ed taught him. He begged his mom to let him borrow the car, a thrill of exhilaration ringing through him when she said yes. He picked up his friend George for the movies, gloating the entire time because his friend failed his driver’s test.

He swore it was just a second, just one tiny fraction of time where he was distracted by his buzzing cellphone and looked away from the road. It was enough to miss the stop sign and blow right through it.

The truck slammed into the passenger side, George’s side, of the car, carrying them through the intersection and into a pole. He remembered the squeal of metal colliding and buckling under the stress, the shattering of glass and the screech of tires across pavement. There was a moment of weightlessness, before his body slammed forward and to the side in an explosion of agony, and then there was nothing at all.

He woke to flashing lights and distorted voices.

“I think he’s coming around,” was the first clear thing he heard. “Kid, can you hear me?”

Was the voice talking to him? There was a movement to his right, and he forced his neck to move, his head flopping against the seat, a spike of pain shooting through his head. George was on a backboard already, a brace around his neck, blood on his face as paramedics removed him from the vehicle.

“Kid,” the same voice said and he flopped his head to the left with a hiss. “Try not to move your neck too much,” the man said, sneaking a hand through the broken window to place a brace on Jon’s neck. “Can you tell me your name?”

He blinked, confused for a second, unsure of the question, but the word ‘Jon’ sprung to the front of his mind, so he said that.

 _Where were they taking George?_ he wanted to ask. _Why can't I move?_ his mind begged his mouth to say. But no matter how hard he concentrated, nothing came out. 

“Good, Jon. That’s good,” the guy said, placing a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Your leg is trapped. We have to cut you out. It’ll be loud, and the vibrations might hurt, but I’ll be right here, okay, Jon?”

Jon couldn’t nod, and he couldn’t voice the thoughts running through his mind: the fear, the pain, the absolute uncertainty of what was going on. Instead, he blindly reached his hand out, and the guy took it, grounding him in the moment. Until the machine started cutting him loose. _Might_ _hurt_ _my_ _ass_ , he thought. It’s agony.

He remembered the pain clawing at his legs, eating at his nerves and gnawing at his skull.

He remembered someone screaming…

A flash of white light…

And a long, slow slide into darkness…

When he woke up in the hospital the next day, everything was different.

“I ruined my best friend’s life,” Jon said, diverting his eyes away from Ryan. He felt the familiar tightness in his chest every time he thought about it, and his throat unwillingly started to close. But if Ryan could admit to his own fucked up version of self-harm, and Brendon could admit to being raped, Jon could do this. For them, for himself maybe, he guessed it didn’t really matter. “I blew through a stop sign when I was 16, got hit by a truck. My friend, George, he was in the passenger seat where the truck hit.”

His fingers drummed against his thigh, and fuck he was not high enough for this, not high enough to confront these memories, but then he saw Brendon, leaning into Pete’s side, Patrick’s arm around his waist and Pete’s around his shoulders, eyes red rimmed and limbs shaking, but he still shot Jon a small, encouraging smile.

Yeah, he could do this.

“George had plans to go to UPenn after high school, wanted to go to Wharton just like his Dad. He was really fucking smart, gonna go places, but the uh, the accident caused permanent brain damage and Georgie became mentally handicap. He had to relearn how to walk, talk, and everything really. He’s never gonna go to college, or Wharton, never gonna grow up to be like his Dad. He can barely write his own name now.”

He scrubbed at his eyes, but he was not crying. He wasn't. Jon didn’t get to cry about this.

“I was a stupid, arrogant little shit head as a teen, thought I was invincible. But I just looked down at my phone for a second. I wasn’t even texting or doing anything stupid, I just looked down and… It’s my fault Georgie’s like that. It’s my fault he’ll never live the life he wanted.

“I tried visiting him after. I really did after all the surgeries it took to fix my leg. But I couldn’t stand the heartbreak in his mother’s eyes every time she looked at her son. I couldn't stand the way his father would look at his son with pride, and then suddenly remember what happen and leave the room. I came over for dinner once and his parents were spoon feeding him mush because he couldn’t really chew and swallow well anymore, let alone pick up his own silverware. I couldn’t do it anymore.  It was too hard to be faced with what I’d done, so I stopped going. I abandoned him because I’m a big, fucking coward.”

“Everyone’s an arrogant little shit as a teen,” Andy said, clapping him on the shoulder. “That doesn’t mean we have to carry those mistakes with us for the rest of our lives.”

 _Yeah, but not everyone nearly killed their best friend,_ he thought.

And Jon couldn’t face those mistakes. If carrying them with him was the only way to ease his guilt, then that was what he was going to do.

* * *

Spencer remembered the sound of the gun, how loud it was compared to all the movies he’s seen, how the sound echoed down the alley and not one single person turned to look. No one came to help.

He remembered the stench of gunpowder and the flash of blinding light as it went off. But mostly, Spencer remembered how much he hated his uncle.

Spencer was always a practical child. At six years old, he marched up to his parents a week before Christmas and told them he figured out Santa wasn’t real, and he did not appreciate being lied to. At least that’s how his parents told it. Spencer didn’t remember the actual event all that well.

But even he admits, eight years old was too young to learn how the world really worked.

His uncle offered to pick him from his drumming lessons near the Strip and drive him home every Friday night ‘to help out his favorite sister.’ His words, not Spencer’s. His uncle told his parents he was taking Spencer out to eat at a diner every week, spending some bonding time with his favorite nephew, but really the man was just using him as an alibi to cover his gambling addiction from his probation officer.

Each week, Spencer sat in some dark corner in some hidden room in the back of a bar, casino, or other shady place watching his uncle gamble all his money away. The rooms were always filled with smoke and smelled like stale beer, the floor sticky with it. The voices of the men were always too loud and the fist fights frequent. More than once, Spencer remembered hiding under a table, or behind a counter as poker chips and cards went flying, half-filled glasses shattering against the ground as fists connected with flesh and men brawled like children.  If he clasped his hands over his ears, and squeezed his eyes shut, he could almost pretend it wasn’t happening.

He might have been a child, but Spencer was never stupid. He knew this wasn’t legal.

Therefore, it was of no surprise to him that most of these men who gambled in dark corners owed money to a bookie or a mob or a gang, to people who weren’t afraid to collect their due in violent ways like he saw that night.

He remembered his uncle leading him down an alley after practice towards whatever back end establishment his illegal hobby was being held in that week, when they stumbled across the oft used collection method. He heard the sound of fists hitting flesh before he saw it, a middle-aged man in thread bare jeans and a holey shirt hanging limping between two men, his face swollen and bloody.

“We agreed,” a fourth man said, his fist raised and stained dark red, “that you would pay me $5000 by today. Where is my money, Frank?”

“I-I don’t have it.”

“Well that’s a problem,” the fourth man said, pulling out his gun. He fired a shot into the man’s knee.

The resulting shriek of anguish sent shivers down Spencer's spine. His uncle didn’t even flinch. Spencer took a step back and subconsciously reached for his uncle’s hand, only for the man to shake him off and scowl at him. He wedged his body partially behind a dumpster as the man sobbed on the ground, clutching his leg and writhing, harsh voices still yelling at him. When his uncle told him to 'get the fuck out from behind the dumpster,' Spencer refused to move. Then his uncle smacked him, before grabbing his arm and dragging into the gambling room.  He dug in his heels just to piss him off more.

The room at least had a small unused bar that Spencer could hide behind for the rest of the night.

He should have seen it coming. He was, if nothing else, a realist, and should have realized his uncle owed money to these same kind of criminals.

They came after his uncle with fists and clubs, and he barely had time to wedge himself under his uncle’s car to avoid the onslaught.

“Wait, wait!” his uncle cried. “I can pay.”

He heard a snort of laughter. “Then where is it?” a voice he did not recognize asked.

He heard the unmistakable sound of fleshing hitting flesh and a shriek from his uncle. “The kid,” his uncle yelped. “You can use him as a drug runner, right?”

“Selling out your own nephew? That’s low.”

He didn’t know what happened next. There was harsh panting and muffled voices, and feet coming closer to the car before Spencer was dragged out from underneath it.

They handed him a paper bag and gave his uncle instructions. Spencer was not entirely sure what he was doing, but he knew it was illegal. He once stole candy from a grocery store, so he was no saint or anything, but his 8 year old brain knew this was definitely worse and he couldn't do this. He couldn’t.

“No,” he told his uncle, thrusting the brown paper bag towards him.

“Listen hear, you little shit,” he uncle said, gripping his arm tightly and digging his fingers in until it hurt. “You are going to do exactly what I tell you to, and you’re not going to say anything. One word of this to anyone, and I will leave you in the middle of the desert and let the birds eat out your eyes and the coyotes eat your body.”

Spencer did exactly as he was told.

He cried himself to sleep that night, and dreamt of large birds with big black wings, red eyes, and bloody beaks pecking at his eyes. He kept his mouth shut when his mother asked why he looked so tired the next morning.

A few weeks later, they asked him to run drugs for them again.

“Go knock on that door and hand them the bag,” his uncle said, pulling his car up to a curb. There were two women standing on the corner, one in ripped tights that exposed more skin than they covered and another in a skirt so short, Spencer could see her red, lace panties. The girl in the tights winked at him, as she sauntered over to his uncle’s car, her heels clicking against the concrete. She leaned into the open window in a manner that wasn’t natural, ass hanging in the air and he winced at the site.

He knocked on the door and handed over the bag without looking up. Before he could turn and leave, cops swarmed his uncle’s car and the apartment. The hand in the doorway reached for him, and he threw himself back, stumbling down the stoop.

There were two shots, an explosion of sound ringing in his ears, then a hand fisted in his shirt and pulled him away from the stoop. He struggled, until he realized it was the woman in the ripped tights pulling him to safety. She showed him her badge and told him, “Everything’s going to be okay, kid.”  Instead of relief, tension settled in his shoulders and his stomach hurt. In the doorway he just vacated, a man crumpled to the ground, gasping in pain, his chest erratically heaving. A river of red rapidly spread across the man's once white shirt, until his chest stopped moving.

Distantly, he realized the cops were leading his uncle away in cuffs. Served the bastard right.

When his mother came to pick him up the police station, the whole story came tumbling from his mouth in one long, terrified burst of words before the energy drained from him. “Please don’t let him leave me in the desert,” he cried in the end, clinging to his mother. “I don’t want the birds to eat my eyes.”

His mother hugged him tightly, tears in her own eyes, promising Spencer that he never had to see his uncle again. Ever.

More than 10 years later, the man was still in jail and his mother kept her word.

Small consolations.

His story was not as tragic as Brendon’s, not as heart-breaking as Ryan’s and not as terrifying as Jon’s, but…

“I watched a bookie shoot a many in an alley once. It’s not like the movies, you know, where people get shot and act like it doesn’t hurt and just get up and keep running. They scream, and they roll around on the ground, and it smells like burning flesh and blood,” he said, shuddering at the memory.

“My uncle owed money to a bookie, too, the kind that shot you in the knees if you didn’t pay. They were gonna beat the shit out of him, so he offered up my services instead. They made me run drugs for them. My uncle said if I didn’t, he was gonna leave me in the middle of the desert and the birds were going to eat my eyes. I know that sounds stupid now, but I was only 8, okay? I still have nightmares about it.”

He shuddered a little and placed his hands on his legs, pulling his limbs in tighter so he was no longer touching Joe and Andy.

“The second time I was forced to run drugs for them, as I was handing some bag to some guy in a doorway, the cops burst in. They fucking shot the guy in the doorway. And I watched him die. My uncle kept screaming it was my fault as they arrested him. Some fucking role model,” he said. “But that’s Vegas for you.”

It wasn’t until Joe grabbed one of his wrists that he realized he’d been rubbing his palms up and down across the thighs of his jeans.

Joe’s hand was trembling around his wrist. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he muttered before letting go.

Spencer wasn't sure how ‘hey, wanna hang out in our bus, tonight,’ turned into, ‘please, share you deepest darkest trauma to your friends.’ He didn’t feel better, or lighter, or whatever other crap people said sharing your feelings out loud did. He just felt like shit.

Ryan was honest to God crying, something Spencer hadn’t seen since the first time his father hit him almost seven years ago. Jon was vibrating in his seat, twitching his hands and swallowing convulsively like he was trying not to vomit. Brendon was completely still, something Spencer had never seen before, never. And the light in his eyes was gone too.  

He finally got his answer, though, on whether or not he had an even remote chance of ever being with Brendon.

It was a big, fucking NO, and he couldn’t blame Brendon for it, wasn’t even a tiny bit mad. No one asked to get raped. No one deserved that.

Fat lot of good ‘sharing and caring’ did them.

He stood to his feet and, and with a calm he did not feel, stormed out of the bus.

A few minutes later, Jon, Ryan and Brendon silently shuffled into their own respective bunks. Spencer kept his curtain firmly shut.

No one said a thing for hours, but he knew no one was sleeping. He could hear Brendon restlessly tossing and turning in the bunk above him. The light of Ryan’s phone was visible through his curtain when Spencer dared to glance out past his own, and he just heard Jon get up to use the bathroom and settle down again, his curtain still moving slightly.

“I’m really glad you guys are my friends,” he blurted out. He gripped his curtain at the edge, firmly holding it shut. Brendon stopped moving in the bunk above him. “I’m sorry you guys had to go through that and I’m sorry that our lives are really fucked up, but uh, I’m here if you guys want to talk more, or if you just want to cry or scream. I promise not to tell anyone. And I really appreciate you guys listening to me uh, earlier.”

The silence that followed was expected. He wouldn’t have responded either.

“I don’t feel any better,” he admitted, and rolled until he was facing the wall. He squeezed his eyes shut and clenched the fabric of his blanket in his hands. All he could see was blood, a growing pool in a dark alley, splotches of dark red on white drying on a still chest. And all he can hear are the gasps of a dying man.

“Yeah, me either,” he heard Jon reply, startling him.

“Me too,” Ryan said.

Brendon remained completely silent, not even a rustle of his blankets in response.

*

It was Ryan that helped a shaking Brendon to his feet and steered him from the bus with an arm around his shoulder only moments after Spencer stormed from the bus. Pete didn’t know exactly what was going to happen once they left and retreated back to their own private spaces alone, but he knew they weren’t going to keep talking about their problems. Tomorrow, each one of those kids would pretend tonight never happened.

He shared a look with Patrick, and they knew, they fucking knew, it was a bad idea to just let those kids go, but he didn’t know what to do. The only thing Pete knew was music, and that was not going to fix this. Pete could barely take care of himself as it was. 

“What the fuck just happened?” Pete said to no one in particular. The words hung in the air, like a guillotine waiting to strike.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Joe snapped, punching his fist into the side of the bus hard enough to leave a dent. “My sister was raped, too” he said, hands shaking too hard to light the joint pressed between his lips. “Tried to kill herself three times. Even after years of therapy, she just…” He shrugged his shoulders, and finally got the joint lit.  

“They need professional help,” Andy agreed. There was no roll of his eyes, though, and his lips didn't tug into a smirk. This wasn’t a joke.

Pete didn’t even know where to start with that. It wasn't like he could just go up to these kids and say ‘yeah, sorry something so shitty happened to you, maybe you should go see a therapist.’ That was not going to end well.

Thankfully, over the next few days, Andy took it upon himself to sit down with each one of the kids individually. He started with Spencer, the practical one, and worked his way to Brendon. Pete only heard bits and pieces of the conversations as he hurried by.

“You can pretend it didn’t happen and you’re over it, but that doesn’t make it go away,” Andy said to Spencer, body blocking the door so Spencer couldn’t leave without knocking him over.

“There’s no shame in seeking professional help for this,” he heard Andy tell Ryan, a hand on his shoulder, holding him in place.

“Blaming yourself forever isn’t going to fix anything. It matters what you do now,” Andy told Jon after literally cornering him in the bathroom at their next venue. Pete made a hasty retreat, backing out of the bathroom before they saw him, and not even bothering to take a piss despite how much his bladder protested until he saw them leave.

Andy was a bigger person than he’ll ever be.

Several days passed before Andy cornered Brendon, who was actively avoiding them, unlike the others who were attempting to force some sense of normalcy.

Just a few weeks ago, he remembered stumbling in on Brendon teaching Patrick some ridiculous song about whose dick was bigger in the lounge of his tour bus. Patrick was laughing too hard to sing when it was his turn. It was the first time Pete heard him laugh in days.

He kind of got into a fight with Patrick. Not the usual fights about songs they got into in at the studio, but a personal one revolving around Pete’s funks and Patrick’s lack of self-esteem. They hadn’t talked since and everyone was giving them a wide berth. He was pretty sure he terrified the Panic kids into avoiding him because he hadn’t seen any of them either since the fight.

Except friggin Brendon and his bright, cheerful smiles and earnest hopefulness and his stupid kindness. Pete just needed some time alone to cool down, but Patrick needed the kind of reassurance or distraction he usually got from Pete. Brendon stepped up and just did that when no one else would.

Pete was having a hard time reconciling that kid with the tired, worn down shell of a human being walking around with Brendon’s skin since that night. While the kid still threw everything he had into his performances, it was nowhere near the 110 percent he usually gave.  

Andy took Joe with him to hunt Brendon down because Joe ‘had experience with this shit.’ But Pete thought Joe might have been added security so Brendon couldn’t squirrel his way out of the talk.

“You’re the bravest person I know.” Andy kissed Brendon on the top of the head. Brendon, despite being taller than the drummer, was curled into his chest. Andy let the kid cling, his own arms wrapped tightly around him.  Joe looked on awkwardly from the side, but he finally lost the nervous jitters that plagued his limbs over the last few days. ~~  
~~

The tightness around Andy’s eyes and the pull on his lips like something was weighing them down and he just couldn't smile haunted Andy’s face the rest of the tour.

“You think they’ll get help?” Pete leaned over and quietly asked Andy in their dressing room near the end of the tour. Panic was there too, playing some video games Patrick bought just for them to lure them into their green room, because they were reluctant to leave the kids to their own devices for too long.

They were watching Spencer and Brendon playfully wrestle like they used to before that night. Except this time there was a cautiousness to Spencer’s movements that wasn’t there before, and he was careful not to pin Brendon to the ground. They were all pretending  they didn’t notice the difference, and that Joe wasn’t hovering nearby just in case.

“No,” he said and Pete winced. Andy never held back his punches. “But I don’t think any of them are going to self-destruct either. At least, not right now.”

That wasn’t exactly reassuring because now didn’t mean never, and they wouldn’t be on tour with these kids forever. What if they weren’t there to stop the impending implosion?

What would happen to these kids then?

Pete hoped he never found out.


	2. The Release: Spencer's Story

It was during sound check that a crash beat against his eardrums, a resounding boom and resulting clatter skittering across the stage. Spencer's vision whited out and then turned red, drum sticks slipping in his sweaty palms.

 _Listen for the things you can hear, smell and feel_ , the therapist his parents forced him to see after _The Incident_ once told him to do when these kind of attacks hit. He was sure there were more instructions than that. He couldn’t remember them right now.

He took a deep breath and felt the slight grove in the drum stick in his right hand, a start of a crack. Andy swore this brand was better than the one Spencer was using, but he went through them just as quickly. Maybe he was doing something wrong.

There was a pedal under his foot and a leather cushion under his ass, perfectly grooved to his butt cheeks after months of constant use. The stage lights bore down on him, a sweltering, blistering heat that he was glad he was not directly under like the others.

He could hear the faint mummer of conversation, a stuttering, “Sorry, I’m sorry,” presumably from whomever caused the crash. The floor beneath him creaked as he shifted his weight. It was an old stage. He hoped no one fell through.

Brendon was making funny noises into the microphone and picking out a tune on his guitar that clashed in juxtaposition to his voice. Brendon was covering for him, drawing attention away from the fact that Spencer suddenly went completely still. When he could, he’d feel grateful for it.

There was the slight smell of unwashed bodies that hovered in the air with every tour, and dust tickled at his nose.

His breath hitched as his vision slammed into focus once more. When Brendon glanced back at him, Spencer nodded and shot him a small smile. They resumed sound check as if nothing ever happened.

He ignored Patrick’s sad eyes and Andy’s crossed arms and pointed stare when he stalked off stage after sound check.

Once back in their dressing room, he was fully prepared to act like nothing happened. It worked for him, it worked for _them._  But then Brendon plopped his skinny ass down on the couch next to him, and rested his head on Spencer’s shoulder. He wrapped an arm around Brendon’s waist on instinct.

“I’m here too, you know, if you ever want to talk,” Brendon said low enough so the others couldn’t hear. The ‘I won’t say anything to them’ was implied. Spencer tightened his arm around Brendon’s waist and dropped a kiss to the top of his head without thinking.

“I know,” he said, a soft warm smile chasing away the vestiges of panic. “I’m fine, really.”

Despite what Andy said, he was past what happened to him. He wasn't over it, not completely, but he was past it. Andy may not see the difference, but Spencer knew what happened didn’t rule his life, not anymore. He did the therapy. He had the coping mechanisms, and if sometimes for just a second, he forgot where he was, that was fine. It wasn't the end of the world.

“I believe you,” Brendon said, pressing his side more firmly into Spencer.

Why, why did he have to say things like that? Things that made Spencer fall a little bit more in love with him, especially now that he knew he couldn’t have him? No one believed him, no one. Not even Ryan whose eyes kept darting over to him like Spencer was going to freak out any second.  Spencer never pretended life was fair, but this was just cruel.

Thankfully, his phone rang, the word _Mom_ flashing across the screen, giving him an excuse to slip away from the feelings he was not having right then, thank you very much.

“Mom, can I ask you a personal question?” he asked, after they exchanged the usual pleasantries and caught up on each other’s lives.

“Is this going to lead to you revealing your massive crush on Brendon and officially coming out? Your father and I know, honey, and we love and support you no matter what,” she said in her ‘I’m your mother and you will do what I say’ tone of voice.

“Mom, what?” he embarrassingly squawked. Thankfully, there was no one around to hear him. “Just, what?”

“I was going to wait until you were comfortable to tell me yourself, but it’s been almost two years honey and I got impatient. So don’t even try to deny it, Spencer James Smith.”

“I…okay, I won’t,” he sighed into the phone, not surprised his mother knew. “But that’s not what I was going to ask.”

“Okay,” his mother let it go, but he knew she hadn’t let it go completely. It would be a very long conversation saved for another time. “What _did_ you want to ask me?”

“Did you ever forgive Uncle, for uh, for what he did?” he blurted out before he could lose his nerve. One of his closely guarded secrets had already been revealed tonight and the world didn’t end. What harm could revealing another do?

“Oh, sweetie,” his mother said. He heard the background noise start to fade, the soft bickering of his sisters and the whir of the dishwasher disappearing, replaced with the click of a door shutting and silence. “Yes, for the things he did, but not for what he made you go through.”

He guessed that kind of makes sense…kind of. “Do you think I need to?”

“I can’t answer that for you sweetheart.”

“Can you at least give me your opinion?”

“Honey, I,” she started and paused. He imagined her twirling a piece of her graying hair with her pointer finger, something she always did when she was thinking. “I think that when we carry around with us a lot of anger towards someone, it prevents you from moving forward with our life.”

“But I have moved on. I have,” he insisted.

“Would we be having this conversation if you did?” she asked, and God he loved his mother, but right now he kind of hated her for being right.

“I want to see him.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. He’s not going to give you what you want.”

But Spencer didn’t know what he wanted. There was a great, big ball of yarn in his chest, blocking him from feeling anything, from knowing the answer. But all balls of yarn had loose thread. Pull too hard on just one loose thread and the whole ball came unraveled.   

Is that what his mother was worried about?

Still, he could not ‘forgive’ the man if he never talked to him.

“I want to see him.”

“Okay,” his mother said.

* * *

Spencer haggled their label into adding a day off in between their Seattle and Las Vegas shows so he could take a ‘personal day.’ They were reluctant to give it to him, but Spencer oh so gently reminded them that Panic had been non-stop touring for almost two years now and Spencer was taking this day off no matter what, even if they had to miss the show in Vegas. Because yeah, that’s right, his band totally had his back and wasn’t going without him either.

He rented a car in Seattle and drove ahead of the bus to the prison in silence.

In the movies, there was always a Plexiglas window between the prisoner and the visitor and phones to talk into. In real life, he was ushered into a barren room with a handful of other visitors. A little girl was chattering away to him about how excited she was to see her father as she bounced on her heels and tapped out a rhythm with her Mary Janes, tugging incessantly on her mother’s arm. She kind of reminded him of Brendon. He vowed never to tell him that.

The prisoners were already sitting at the dozen or so tables clustered in the tiny room. He watched as the little girl skipped over to her father, tugging on her mother’s hand as she went. He spotted his uncle a few tables over, shoulders hunched and fingers drumming against the table, a steady _tap, tap, tap,_ audible even from across the room.

“Spencer,” his uncle said with a smirk, as Spencer stiffly lowered himself into the chair opposite him. “You’ve grown.”

His uncle's hair was grayer, and his wrinkles were more pronounced,  but his arms were thinner than Spencer remembered and shorter. There was also a poorly drawn tattoo of a scorpion on his neck that wasn’t there eleven years ago. His uncle noisily sighed, his face slipping into a scowl, the same one Spencer remembered being thrust upon him when he tried to take his hand that night in the alley. “Why are you here?”

Why was he here?

“Why did you do it?” he heard himself ask, but it didn’t much sound like himself. Spencer was never one to ponder why. He knew the universe sucked and he knew bad shit happened to good people for no other reason than other people were cruel, cruel bastards. Instead, he accepted things and fixed or ignored them the best he knew how. This wasn’t him.

“Why’d I do what?”

There were so many ways he could answer that question. He settled on, “Why did you sell me out to a gang?”

His uncle shrugged, fucking shrugged and said, “What’d you expect me to do?”

“To not sell me out,” he said, voice just barely this side of calm and higher than it should be like it was reaching for one of Brendon’s ridiculously high notes. ~~  
~~

“They were about to kick the shit out me.”

“So?” he said, barely giving his uncle time to finish his thought. “That wasn’t my problem. I’m not the idiot who gambled all his money away to a gang.”

“Look kid, what do you want from me?”  His uncle had the audacity to look bored, his eyes wandering to the other prisoners and families in the room.

Spencer clenched his fists, fingernails digging into his palms. “An apology.”

Now he understood what his mother meant, and before the words even left his mouth he knew she was right. Bad men never really apologize for the wrongs they've committed.

His uncle shrugged again and scanned the room, nodding as his eyes meet that of the little girl’s father, who glared back and rubbed his thumb against his pointer an middle finger, a gesture Spencer knew meant money. “I hear you’re famous now,” his uncle said, turning his gaze back on Spencer, a smile settling on his face. “How about you send your dear old uncle a little bit of those profits and I’ll apologize as many times as you want.”

Spencer stood on stiff legs and stalked from the room, his uncle spewing curses behind him.

“How’d it go?” Brendon asked. He was leaning against the driver’s door smoking a cigarette when Spencer finally found his way back to the car.

“You know, smoking ruins your voice,” Spencer said as he fumbled with the keys in his pocket and they slipped from his fingers. “Shit,” he muttered as he reached for them.

Brendon was quicker and snatched them from the grass. “Frank Sinatra smoked until he died and his voice was still golden,” he replied as he herded Spencer towards the passenger seat. He shifted the car into gear and silently left the prison behind. “Where do you want to go?”

“My house, just, take me home.”

Brendon fiddled with the radio as he drove to Summerlin, finally settling on some station crooning shitty 80s love ballads. “Spencer, I,” he started, eyes staring straight ahead at the road. Whatever he was going to say, he thought better of as he shook away the thought. “Do you feel any better?” he asked instead, glancing at Spencer from the corner of his eyes before snapping his attention back to the road when Spencer caught him.

“Yes,” the answer came easily to him, though he was not entirely sure why. He just did. His uncle wasn’t the big scary monster from his dreams.  His eyes were brown, not blood red, arms wiry and thin, not large and muscular like he thought he remembered. He was just a pathetic little man who cared for no one, but himself and money. That shouldn’t be reassuring.

But it was.

“Did you forgive him?” Brendon asked as the song on the radio switched over to something a little more tolerable.

“Fuck no.”

“But you do feel better?”

“I do.”

* * *

His mother welcomed them with hugs and kisses and their first home cooked meal since the night before they left to record their CD in Maryland.

Brendon passed out in Spencer’s bedroom shortly after dinner – he was spending too much of his time sleeping these days – but Spencer stayed up all night staring blankly at the television in the living room until his mother wandered in early in the morning with a mug of peppermint hot chocolate and a hug.

“You were right,” he said, clinging to his mother, his face buried in her shoulder as she pet his hair like she used to when he was a kid. “But I do feel better. I think if he had been sorry, it would’ve been weird, but knowing he isn’t, sort of helps."

“You did a very brave thing, baby, and I’m very proud of you,” she said, massaging his scalp gently. He relaxed even further in the way only a child could around his mother.

They stayed that way until the rest of the house woke up around them, Brendon slipping by on his way to the kitchen with a shy smile and small wave.

“When are going to make a move on that boy,” his mother said, as Spencer pulled away. His mother's smile was fond, and turned away, afraid to break her heart.

It was a punch to the gut, one that hurt more than his uncle's slimy ways to pilfer money from him. “I can’t,” he said. “Mom, something bad happened to Brendon, something real bad. And because of it, I don’t think he’ll ever…”

“Oh baby,” his mother said, cupping his cheek with one of her delicate hands. “Everything will be okay.”

And because his mother said it, Spencer believed it.

* * *

The thing is, you can’t will your feelings away with the power of your mind, no matter how much you try or how much you want to. So no matter how many times Spencer told himself he couldn’t have Brendon, it didn’t make his feelings for Brendon go away.

Plus, Brendon’s increasingly odd behavior was making it extremely hard to move on.

It started with an almost kiss, at least that’s what it seemed like at the time to Spencer’s teenaged, sex-addled brain. Zack had pushed the four of them into a small room when security made a mistake and accidentally let a bunch of teenage girls into the venue too soon, who’d immediately hunted them down, out for Panic blood. Brendon staggered into him, saved from going down hard in the dark room by Spencer’s steadying hand on his hip. He expected Brendon to pull away quickly, but instead he pressed in closer and titled his head up, their lips nearly touching. “Spencer, I,” he said, then Zack burst into the room and Brendon jumped out of his arms.

“All clear, guys,” Zack said. Everyone shuffled out of the room, effectively ending whatever moment they may have been having in Spencer’s head.

A few days later, Brendon decided he wanted to hold Spencer’s hands.

They were at a meet and greet, sitting at a table covered with some tacky looking table cloth with shamrocks and leprechauns and pots of gold, when Brendon grabbed his free hand and didn’t let go. Spencer didn’t even notice at first, not until Zack told them it was time to go and Brendon’s hand finally slipped from his. He missed the feel of it immediately.

“H-hey,” Brendon stuttered after his turn in the shower a few days later, catching Spencer by the wrist before he could slip in. “We uh, have a day off in Philadelphia tomorrow. Do you want to do something, um, just the two of us?”

Spencer frowned at Brendon’s apparent nervousness, but shrugged his shoulders and agreed. “What do you have in mind?”

Brendon’s resulting smile was that of a kid who couldn’t believe he was actually getting what he asked for. “There’s this ice cream place called the Franklin Fountain where everything is old-fashioned and shit. The employees even wear clothes from like the 1800s, I don’t even know. But it’s supposed to be awesome.”

It wasn't until he was sitting outside the store, a giant sundae between the two of them, that he realized Brendon had said ‘just the two of us.’

“Brendon, is this a…” he started, then Brendon looked up, his perfect, plush lips wrapped around a spoon and oh how Spencer wished his dick was that spoon. He stopped and shifted uncomfortably in his seat.  He couldn’t, he wouldn’t, he refused to get his hopes up like that. This wasn’t a date.

“Except how it kind of was,” Ryan disagreed when he told him about it later. Jon nodded along with Ryan. The traitors. “He didn’t invite us along.”

“You guys shared one ice cream,” Jon added.

“And he paid for it. It was totally a date.”

“No,” Spencer said. _No, no, no, no, no_ , he thought. “Brendon’s –”

“Not totally straight,” Ryan interrupted.

“But traumatized away from anything gay related for life.”

“You don’t know that,” Jon said. “But probably,” he agreed when Spencer glared at him.

It was fine, though, totally fine. Spencer could totally deal with this, until Brendon decided to crawl into his bunk one night, rousing Spencer from a dead sleep.

“You were having a nightmare,” Brendon explained, sliding into the bunk. He wrapped an arm around Spencer’s waist and buried his cold nose into Spencer’s bare back.

Yup, totally fine.

Until they woke up in the morning, that was, with Brendon’s back pressed against his chest and Spencer's morning wood poking Brendon in the ass. He tried to pull away before Brendon woke up and noticed the hard dick not so gently pressing into him, but he just ended up waking the other teen up.

Brendon was out of the bunk so quick the roadrunner would have been impressed, his breathing ragged and chest heaving. “It’s, it’s not you,” Brendon quickly said. “It’s not…it’s not.”

“I know,” Spencer said, letting Brendon stumble into his arms, and holding him tight in a vain attempt to protect him. “I know. I’m sorry.”

Brendon’s shoulders shook, and he didn’t need to feel the dampness on his shoulder to know the other teen was crying. “You don’t have to,” he choked out, clinging to Spencer tighter.

“I know,” he said. He knew he didn’t have to be sorry, not for waking up with a hard dick. It was a perfectly normal bodily response, but he could be sorry for what happened to Brendon.

The door to the bunk area opened. Jon stopped dead in his tracks when he saw them, Ryan running into him from behind. He shook his head without jostling Brendon, and they backed away slowly, quietly shutting the door behind them.

“I swore never again,” Brendon said, his breath still hitched, but no longer crying. “But I know it’s not all like, like that and I didn’t expect to like you so much. And I wouldn’t mind trying with you, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to give you what you want.”

“Slow down,” Spencer said, urging Brendon to sit down on his bunk beside him. “What are you trying to say here?”

Brendon slipped out from under his arm and curled up on the other side of the bunk. “Spencer, I, I’ve known for awhile that there’s something there between us. But after what happened, I never thought I’d want another man that way. It took me a long time to even realize that I felt differently about you than I did Ryan or Pete or Jon, that I felt the same way about you that I did Audrey. And it scares me. So I didn’t do anything about it, even though I knew how you felt. Because I can’t give you everything you want, and I didn’t want to disappoint you. I knew I wouldn’t be able to explain it to you either, why I couldn't...not without telling you about the, about what happened. It was a secret I was going to take to the grave, until, well, you know.”

“What was uh,” Spencer said licking his dry lips, and taking a deep breath, trying to wrap his thoughts around the fact that Brendon wanted him too, but also didn’t want him at the same time. “What was with all hand holding, and cuddling and almost kissing about then?”

“It’s just, Andy said some stuff. I know it wasn’t fair to you, I’m sorry, but I wanted to see what it was like if we were dating, I wanted to see if I could do it.”

“And?” Spencer asked, his mouth dry. “And can you be in a relationship with me?”

“There’s a lot I am willing to give you, Spencer Smith," he admitted, staring up at Spencer past his long lashes. "But I don’t know when, or if I can ever give you all of me.”

“That’s not an answer,” he said, grabbing Brendon's wrist when he started to pull further away. Brendon shrugged, but didn't offer any other reply. Spencer rubbed his free hand over his tired face, and tried to drown the hope threatening to break free in his chest, burning bright and hot. But he couldn't help wondering, maybe, just maybe, he could have something more. “Do you know the first moment I realized I liked you?”

Fear flashed through Brendon’s eyes, but it quickly disappeared as Brendon clamped down on his emotions. He shook his head and turned away so Spencer couldn’t see his face. Brendon didn’t need to see him, though, Spencer just needed him to listen.

“We were still in high school, and we were recording our demos in our crappy little practice space. Ryan had just started laying into you about how you were singing it wrong, but then turned around and did a terrible job of explaining how he wanted it to sound. I expected you to, start yelling back, storm out, I don’t know, something explosive. And I was ready to be pissed at you, cuz Ryan didn't need any more of that in his life at that point even though he was being a dick. But you were so patient with Ryan, waited till he could find the right words, and kept trying until your voice was hoarse to get it just right. I’m not going to deny it,” he said, encouraged when Brendon partially turned back towards him, enough that he could catch a glimpse of Spencer from one eye. “You are ridiculously hot. But that is only part of the reason I want you. I want to be with you because I like you as a person, and you make me a better person. I want only what you can give, okay? That’s all, whatever you can give, because I already like you the way you are and that’s enough for me.”

He grabbed Brendon’s hand, interlacing their fingers and holding tight. “But if you can’t live with that, don’t want a relationship where there’s no, you know,” he said wincing, because there was really no good way of saying 'if you can't bottom for me' without being graphic, or saying something that felt too crude for this intimate moment. “That’s fine, okay. I will completely understand why you don’t want to try. But if you're okay without it, then so am I. If you want to try being in a relatiionship, then so do I.”

“And if it doesn’t work?” Brendon said, turning away from him again, but letting Spencer keep hold of his hand

“Then it doesn’t work and we go back to being friends. It doesn’t have to be awkward. It may feel awkward, and we may want to be weird around each other and drift apart, but I am not going to let that happen, okay. We will move on. We will be fine.”

“You can’t know that for sure,” Brendon said, his voice a little wet as he sniffled, but he had Brendon's full attention now. 

“I can. You know how? Because look at what happened to us, Brendon, and look where we are now? We’ve had some pretty horrible shit happen to us, but we didn’t let it ruin our lives. We persevered. We both have every right to be pissed at the world, to just give up, but we didn’t. We came through. If we can do that, we can do this.”

Brendon leaned forward, and Spencer met him halfway, their lips softly pressing together in a chaste kiss. 

“I want to try,” Brendon whispered and rested his forehead on Spencer's. "I want this." 

“Then just let me have what you’re comfortable with giving. That’s all I want.”

 


	3. Jon's Story

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: None of this is true and no harm was intended and I've never met any of these people.
> 
> And I just want to add a little extra to my disclaimer and say that the opinions of my characters ARE NOT MY OPINIONS, nor are they the opinions of the people in this story in real life, no are their opinions always right or politically correct. It is entirely fictional, all of this is fictional, including the characterizations of each person, and just because one of my characters says or does something, does not mean I believe it, or that it is true. And now this disclaimer has gotten a little repetitive, but for the sake of my sanity, I’m just going to repeat that just because one of my character’s believes something, it does mean they are right in the real world or that I believe it. Their characterizations are entirely for drama. There would be no character development if all of the characters were perfect, and this entire story is mostly about character development, plus my own desire to torture the characters provide a ton of comfort.

Sometimes Jon’s leg still hurt, especially in winter, when the cold bitter chill crawled under his skin, attached to his bones like a leech, and settled in for the season, until the warm humid summer fought off the pain. Touring could be downright agony when he was constantly on the move, never sleeping in a warm comfortable bed at night, never giving his leg a chance to rest and heal, and putting too much stress on it during their shows because well…

This was his job, and Jon didn’t want any other.

When the pain started making its presence known, like a child begging for attention, he immediately visited an urgent care facility in whatever city he was in. He snuck away from his band, only telling security because he had to, sat in the bland waiting room and lied to the doctors till they sent him back to the bus with a prescription for a strong pain medicine, something he couldn't just buy over-the-counter. Then he took way more of the prescribed pain pills than the doctor recommended until he couldn’t feel his legs anymore. Either that, or he drank or smoked weed until he forgot he had legs at all.

He still remembered lying in a hospital hopped up on morphine that didn’t quite take all of his pain away. Two surgeries to fix his leg, weeks of therapy and rest and more time to heal than medically necessary didn't take it away either. The bone deep ache made him want to give up and quit trying to walk almost every day. There was still a piece of metal wedged in there holding his once shattered tibia and fractured fibula together, and sometimes he swore he could feel the metal grating against his bones.

His doctors told him that it was all psychological, that the pain that kept him awake at night despite the morphine, and the ache in his bones long after his leg healed was entirely in his head.

Jon was almost completely sure they were absolutely right, but knowing still didn’t take the pain away.

So he smoked weed, and he drank too much alcohol, and he did drugs and abused prescription pain pills, and he fixed other people’s problem not to indulge in the stereotypical life of a rock star, but to forget. To forget the pain, and just for a moment, to forget who he was. And in those moments when the alcohol and weed and drugs dulled his brain, he could create a new identity, a new person that wasn’t a life-ruining fuck up, but someone people could rely on to be there for them. Someone who was just Jonathan Jacob Walker, and not the kid that destroyed the Henley family’s lives while he got everything he wanted and more.

At least, that was what the people who knew him in high school said about him, that he got everything. Like Stacy from fourth period English during his junior year – the year of the accident – and the ex-girlfriend of George. He’d run into her while visiting his family and his girlfriend while Panic was on a few days break.

“You’re living the dream,” Stacy said, the haughty ‘huh’ implied at the end.  He recognized the snide sneer on her face, and the _anger and disbelief_ and _sarcasm_ in her voice, an undercurrent of _you should be ashamed of yourself_ in her tone. He’d heard it before, time and time again, every time he saw someone he knew from high school. It was the same look and tone he got from every single person at his school after he returned from the accident. He spent a year and a half without a single friend, completely alone until he made friends outside of his school. Being alone was quite possibly the worst thing in the universe. But no one would talk to him in anything other than snide remarks casually thrown at him in the hallways. They all blamed him for George.

He blamed himself.

“You seen Georgie lately?” Stacy asked, knowing full well he hadn’t. Usually, most past acquaintances were too polite to bring it up. Stacy went right for the juto to the throat.

There wasn’t enough air in his lungs to reply.

“That’s what I thought,” she said and left him standing in the aisle, holding a 24-pack of beer and a 2-liter bottle of Coke.

He reminded himself that Stacy was the bitch who broke up with George while he was still in a coma after the accident. She was the bitch that hadn’t visited Georgie once since then, but that didn’t make Jon feel any better about himself.

He went home, smoked a joint, drank more of the beer than he planned to, canceled all his plans for the evening, and let himself wonder what would happen if he told his fans about the accident, about what he’d done. Would they turn their backs on him? Throw insults like the people he once thought of as friends? Demand he be kicked out of the band. Maybe he deserved that.

The thought was oddly calming.

But Fall Out Boy knew, and they didn’t make snide remarks about George under their breath. Andy even told him to forgive himself and move on. And Ryan, Spencer and Brendon, they _knew_ and they didn’t look at him and think ‘this is the asshole that ruined his friend’s life while he’s living the dream.’ His band didn’t treat him any differently. Ryan still stayed up late smoking weed with him, making music they were convinced in their drugged out state would change the world, and nine times out of ten turned out to be crap they laughed at. Spencer was still the steady rock that Jon leaned on when he needed to, the friend he could completely relax around and wax poetical, but ultimately philosophical bullshit, with.

And Brendon was the one Jon told all his secrets to, even if he didn’t mean to, and knew he would never be judged.  Brendon understood him like no one else ever did, though he never knew why until that night on Fall Out Boy’s bus. Now Jon knew it was because Brendon understood what it was like to have one moment, one earth shattering event, change his entire life. ~~  
~~

Neither could have known what was going to happen, and maybe nothing would have changed even if they did. But they still couldn’t help but wonder how different life would be if they just made a different choice in that one tiny moment?

His band should hate him. They should despise him. They should want to…. _fuck,_ he thought.

He wouldn’t think that. They would never kick him out, and Jon didn’t want to go.  

*

Sometimes, Jon sat outside of the Henley family home in his car, staring at the front door wondering what he would see should someone walk out. Would Mrs. Henley still have the same heartbroken look on her face, hidden under layers of forced cheer? Would Mr. Henley still awkwardly pat Georgie’s back when he learned a new skill, like tying his shoes, and then flee to the little box in their spare bedroom holding George’s old trophies that meant nothing anymore?

He didn’t let himself think what Georgie would look like. He liked to remember who George was, the brilliant, but sarcastic little shit that encouraged all of Jon’s pranks and stupid ideas, but made them full-proof, made them work. Just like the time they completely emptied the local community pool of water on the hottest day of the summer. It was still an open case in his little part of Chicago, and no one still had any clue how they did it.

He wanted that George, the one who smirked at him as they watched the news clip on their misdeed, and started plotting their next adventure.

Jon wanted his best-friend back.

The sun began to set. He should go. He should stop being the cowardly creeper who sat outside of the home where people he barely knew anymore lived. He should never come back. They didn't want them here. They didn't need Jon's stalking. 

A knock on his window sent his heart racing, a thready _badump badump_ pounding against his rib cage. He jumped high enough to smack his head off the roof of his car.

Mrs. Henley stood at his passenger door, miming rolling down a window. Against his better judgement, he followed the directive with shaking hands. “Mrs. Henley, uh—”

“Jon, please, it’s Gloria,” she interrupted thankfully, because Jon didn’t know what he was going to say. The smile she offered him was still the same beautiful one he remembered from when he was a teenager, the one that looked like _love_ and _kindness,_ and everything else Jon didn’t deserve. “How long have you been sitting out here?”

 He stared at the tear in the steering wheel of his piece of crap vehicle. He could have bought a new car, could easily replace it, but somehow driving the same piece of crap he owned when he was just a photographer for The Academy Is felt right.

“How many times have you sat out here?” Gloria asked after the silence stretched on for a bit too long. Jon rubbed his finger over the tear, back and forth, back and forth, shrugging his tense shoulders in response.

“Come in, Jon, please,” she said, her voice soft. “Georgie would love to see you.”

It was like following the executioner to the gallows. Except that was kind of mean. Mrs. Henley, Gloria, had never been anything, but kind to him. But he was still not convinced this wasn’t a death march.

He followed her up the same concrete stairs he remembered as a kid, with the same crack running through the third one. George once stuck a stick in that crack and sat on it, pissing off a colony of ants that crawled into his pants and underwear and bit the shit out of him. At the time he laughed hysterically at his friend's misery. Now, he almost chuckled at the memory. The inside of the house was almost like he remembered, but the family picture that hung above the mantle was different. It was new, taken since the accident. It hadn’t been like that last time he was here. The family wore matching sweaters and smiles. Georgie’s younger sister had grown into quite the beautiful young women, and Mr. Henley’s hair had gone grey. A few wrinkles found their way around Mrs. Henley’s eyes and Georgie had lost his boyish looks, his shoulders broadening and face sharpening. The Henleys looked happy.

But appearances were just that, and nothing more.

“Georgie,” Gloria called as she ushered Jon into the living room and urged him to sit down. “You have a visitor.”

It was the same thing she said every time he came to visit before the accident. After, George would come clambering down the stairs like he had 100-pound lead weights attached to his ankles. He would come careening around the corner, a smirk on his face, before clapping Jon on the shoulder and racing him upstairs. Now there was a slow shuffle of feet, the steady thump of a cane against the ground, and Georgie wobbled around the corner like a newborn foal. Even the smile was different, a full curve of the lips like an excited child rather than the lopsided smirk of a mischievous teen.

“Jon,” he cried, throwing his arms wide and launching at him.

“Georgie, uh, hi, hi,” he said, standing to his feet and easily accepting the hug. “I uh, I wasn’t sure if you would remember me.”  When Georgie’s face fell, he mentally kicked himself and hastily added, “I mean, because uh, I’ve been a terrible friend and haven’t been here in uh, forever.”

“You were touring with Panic at the Disco,” Georgie said, his voice lower and slower than before the accident, and slightly slurred.

“They’re his favorite band,” Mr. Henley said, as he walked into the room and placed a hand on his son’s shoulders. “He listens to you guys all the time. Georgie’s very proud of you, Jon.”

Jon wanted to flash a brilliant smile, stutter out a thank you and launch into the story of his success like he did every time someone mentioned his role in Panic. Instead it sort of felt like his heart was breaking. He could feel a dull ache in his leg being to settle, starting just below his knee. Soon, he knew, it would spread to his ankle and start to throb incessantly. He told himself it wasn’t real, but that never made the pain go away. He'd need to stop at an urgent care center of the way home. He was all out of pills. 

“Georgie, why don’t you go show Jon your room. We’re having dinner soon, would you like to join us Jon?” Gloria said in her honey sweet voice.

“Uh, sure,” he said, and then let Georgie grab his hand and drag him out of the living room. Georgie’s new bedroom was on the first floor instead of up the stairs. There was a poster of Panic above his dresser and one of Fall Out Boy next to it. Several pictures hand drawn in colored pencil, like the ones he used to make as a young child, decorated the space between band posters. Georgie must have made them recently. A stuffed lion sat upon Georgie’s bed. It must be new too, because Jon didn’t remember Georgie having that as a kid.

He forgot himself for a moment and plopped down on Georgie’s bed – that, at least was familiar – and lied down, staring at the ceiling, trying to remember what he would have said before the accident.

Georgie pressed play on his CD player, a Fever You Can Sweat Out emanating from the speakers.  He wanted to say ‘don’t bother,’ or ‘I’ve heard these songs a million times, let’s play something else,’ something he wouldn’t have hesitated to say before. Instead, he opened his mouth and nothing came out.

“This is my favorite,” Georgie said, skipping ahead to Time To Dance. He was relieved it wasn't I Write Sins, Not Tragedies. Jon, and the rest of the band, were sort of starting to hate that song.

“This is a good one,” Jon said, but he didn’t really have anything more to say on it. He didn’t actually write the song. He just played with the band.

Georgie flopped down on the bed next to him, face to face, their noses almost touching. It was almost familiar, something they did a thousand times as children and teens. This was how Jon told George all about how Samantha was a jerk who broke his heart, and how George told him how he went all the way with Stacy for the first time, and how Jon thought photography might be his future career. 

George had Panic’s CD in his hands. He pointed to a picture of Spencer from inside the CD.

“You want me to tell you about them?” Jon asked. Georgie nodded in response.

Jon pulled out his phone and pulled up his favorite picture of Spencer, the first picture he ever took of the drummer, ignoring the missed phone calls and text messages. Spencer was in in full makeup in the photo, and pounding on the drums during a show, his lips pressed into a line like he did whenever he was playing. “Spencer’s pretty awesome,” Jon admitted as Georgie took the phone from his hands. “He’s super mature for his age, way more mature than me, and he’s usually the one talking the rest of us out of doing stupid shit. He also takes care of our finances, and works with our label to schedule the tour and appearances, and the band would pretty much fall apart without Spencer. He’s also stupidly in love with Brendon,” he chuckled softly. “But he also likes things to go according to plan, and freaks out a little when they don’t. That’s why he and Brendon work so well together, though, you know? Cuz Brendon’s the kind of guy who just goes with the flow.”

Georgie pointed to a picture of Ryan in his full sparkly makeup and ridiculous outfit, and Jon couldn't help, but laugh. He was still glad his band was unsuccessful in their attempts to make him wear makeup and dress him in those god awful clothes like theirs. He pulled up a picture of Ryan without makeup on his phone. He was completely relaxed in the photo, a rare occurrence for the typically high-strung musician, and he was leaning his shoulder against Spencer, a guitar in his hands and a real smile on his face. “Ryan’s kind of a prissy little bitch,” he admitted. “Just a tad self-absorbed and likes things to go his way at all times. He gets kind of nasty if he doesn't get his way. It's kind of annoying really. But he makes amazing music and he’s super witty. Got this great, dry sense of humor, kind of like me. It’s why we get along so well, you know?” he said again, even though Georgie really couldn’t know. 

“Brendon plays like 20 instruments,” he added without prompting, and pulled up a picture of Brendon playing the piano with one hand and striking a ridiculous pose, like Freddie Mercury, with the rest of his body. “He’s probably the most sincere person I know. He’s just got this enthusiasm for life, for everything really, despite all the horrible shit that’s happened to him, and I’m kind of jealous of him, you know, of that enthusiasm.”

“He’s my favorite,” Georgie admitted, in his slow deep voice.

“Hey, what about me?” Jon joked. It felt good to tease Georgie again, it felt familiar.  _Everything is okay,_ he repeated over and over in his head. 

Georgie snorted. “You’re still my favorite person, Jon.”

“Well good,” Jon said, his smile softening before he said. “You’re still my favorite person too, Georgie.”

Georgie planted a big, wet kiss on his cheek and Jon laughed. “You learned that from watching videos of Brendon, didn’t you?”

Georgie nodded, and Jon felt something in his chest loosen. This was okay, right? “Want to hear about the time I almost drowned on a dare? Or how about the time William Beckett mistook Ryan for a girl while drunk and Ryan kneed him in the nuts? Or the time Sean kissed a cactus while high cuz Tom bet him $50 he wouldn’t and I had to take him to the hospital?”

“All of it,” Georgie said. So Jon told him as many stories as he could fit in, Georgie laughing at most of it, even if he didn't understand it all, until Gloria called them down for dinner.

“So, Georgie,” Gloria said as she set a plate down in front of Jon, “how was program today?”

Georgie bounced in his seat as he scooped a giant heap of potatoes from his plate and shoved them in his mouth. “Linda yelled at Eddie again for closing the door,” he said with his mouth full.

“Swallow first, honey, then talk,” Gloria softly chided.

Georgie swallowed noisily before setting down his spoon. “Eddie can’t hear her, you know, but she just goes on and on. We got to make lanyards today that we’re gonna sell at the festival next week, and oh, Mary taught me how to use the coffee machine and I made coffee all by myself.” 

“Good job, Georgie,” Mr. Henely said, clapping his son on the back. 

Georgie’s hands twitched before they grabbed his spoon again and shoved another mouthful of mashed potatoes into his mouth. He turned to Jon and said with his mouth still full, “but I’m not allowed to have any, Mary said, cuz of my meds. But it’s nice to make it for the others, right?”

“Yes, Georgie, that’s very sweet of you,” Gloria said, patting her son on the arm. “Why don’t you tell Jon about your new job?”

“They hired me to clean after the program,” Georgie says proudly around a mouthful of food. “Now I can get my own apartment.”

Jon wanted to be happy for him, he really did. Georgie sounded happy, he _was_ happy. Georgie liked his life, but Jon was still stuck wondering what if.

_What if?_

Georgie would be a junior in college right now, living in a dorm, on his own, working towards an MBA and not…

He smiled anyways, and said, "that’s awesome, Georgie." 

"I'm gonna get an apartment, and a cat," Georgie said, and then froze. His hands twitched, the spoon slipping from his grip and clattering to the ground. His mouth went lax and his eyes started to rapidly flutter.

“What –” Jon started to say, as Georgie’s whole body went rigid, his gaze unfocused and far away.

“It’s okay,” Gloria said, setting her spoon down and staring hard at her plate. “He’s having a seizure. It’s nothing to worry about, unless it lasts for more than five minutes,” she added, but her voice hitched at the end. Jon put his own silverware down. He wasn’t that hungry anymore.

Mr. Henley stared at the clock on the wall, counting the seconds as they ticked by until Georgie blinked, his gaze refocusing. “Why don’t you lie down for a little bit,” Mr. Henley said, helping his son stand and leading him by the arm from the kitchen. Georgie looked at his plate in confusion, but let his father take him away.

Jon watched him leave, his heart pounding and tearing at his ribs, his chest, his skin until he broke.

“I’m sorry,” he cried, burying his face into his hands. He didn't know, okay? He didn't know about the seizures. He knew Georgie's brain was messed up, and he knew he was on medicine for some sort of disorder after the accident, but he didn't know just how much damage he'd caused. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean for this happen. I didn’t,” he choked on a sob and buried it in his chest. “He would be in college now, living a real life and having fun and not…His life would be perfect, if I just paid more attention. If I hadn't... I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“Jon,” Gloria sighed, leaning over the table to place a comforting hand on his arm. “Stop, it’s…” She didn’t say okay, because they both know it wasn't. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, before meeting his gaze. “For the longest time, I was upset. I was mad at you, mad at myself, mad at the world for taking my baby away. But then I joined a support group, and they made me realize that life isn’t perfect,” she said, removing her shaking hand from his arm. “And we can’t pretend that is it. There’s no point in wondering what if. This isn’t the life we imagined for him," she said, making a vague gesture towards the door her son just vacated. "But that doesn’t make Georgie’s life any less worth living, or us any less happy for having Georgie in our life.

"And I don't blame you for what happened anymore, Jon. People get damaged, and no one escapes life without a few scars. Even if the accident never happened, there was never any guarantee that Georgie’s life would turn out okay. But it did happen, and we all have to learn to move on, to let go of the guilt and the anger and to be happy with the life given to us.”

It would be so easy to just accept her words, to accept her forgiveness and move on. Gloria offered absolution, everything he wanted and more. 

"I want to," Jon said. "But I can't."

Gloria nodded as if she already knew that would be his answer. 

"I should just..." he pointed to the door and stood from his seat. 

"Okay," Gloria said, "But please, Jon, come back. Georgie misses you, and it would be nice to see you again."

Jon wanted to go home and drink enough alcohol to forget this ever happened. He wanted to take enough pain pills to completely erase this memory from his mind and never, ever come back. But he owed the Henley's that much.

He owed Georgie this. 

And if he came back enough times, maybe he could accept Gloria's words, and maybe, just maybe, he could move on.

*

He’d been home in Chicago for two weeks when he finally got the nerve to check the messages on his cellphone.

“You can’t keep avoiding them forever,” Cassie said day after day, and he just shrugged in response every time. He was due to meet the guys for the start of their next tour in a few days though. He actually needed to check his phone to see if they still wanted him there. Otherwise it might be awkward when he showed up at their designated meeting place.

The amount of voicemails and text messages made his sluggish heart pound, despite the amount of weed he smoked in preparation for this moment. He hesitated, his thumb hovering over the voicemail icon, when his girlfriend told him to stop being such a baby and pushed his thumb down.

 _“It’s Brendon…again. You’re such a fucking loser. Answer your fucking phone,”_ Brendon whined in the first voicemail.

“ _Jon, it’s Spencer. I need to know when your plane’s scheduled to land here so we can come pick you up.”_  The ‘we,’ he assumed was Brendon and Spencer.  Since officially becoming SpencerandBrendon, the two rarely did anything apart. (He wondered, if the fangirls knew, if the would give them a cool name like Ryden) Though Spencer and Ryan showing up together was equally probable.

“ _Jon, what do you think of this?”_ The next voicemail started, and it was typical Ryan that he didn’t say his name, just expected everyone to know who the fuck he was. Then music started to drift through his speakers, a new melody he’d never heard before, but it was too distorted by his phone for him to really form an opinion on it. Ryan should have known that. He wondered how high the dude was when he left the message.

 _“Jon Walker,”_ Brendon said in the next voicemail, “ _Spencer and Ryan are doing the weird best friend thing again, and I'm all alone, and I’ve got no one to complain to about it. Answer your fucking phone, please?”_

The next voicemail kind of sounded like heavy breathing, though he wasn’t sure. It could have been Ryan trying to play music into a tiny speaker again.

 _“I know it’s only been two weeks, and maybe you need some space from us, but you’re making Ryan sad,”_ Spencer said in his ‘you better sit your ass down and listen to the lecture on proper behavior I’m about to school your ass with’ voice. Yeah, Jon had been on the receiving end of that voice a few times.  _“If you don’t reply soon about your flight, Bren and I are gonna leave your dumb ass at the airport and let you find your own way.”_

Guess those answered his questions. The relief was instantaneous. 

His text messages were no less awesome and ridiculous.

 _Brendon’s a vagrant and Spencer’s a bag of dicks,_ Ryan texted and he had no idea what that was even supposed to mean. It was followed by:

_Seriously, I love them, but they’re disgusting me._

_They’re unnatural. I’m gonna barf._

_And now they’re making out._

_I’m pretty sure they forgot I was here._

_Save me._

_You’re a douchebag too._

There were various other texts from Ryan, but most of them made no sense. They could either drunk texts or high texts, he assumed, or they were supposed to be potential lyrics. It could really go either way with Ryan.

Brendon’s texts made more sense, but they were no less ridiculous. The first was a picture of his dog with the text, _dogs >cats. _It was followed by a bunch of random thoughts, before it said, _Spence and I just had better pizza than that place u took us 2 in Chicago. If you don’t reply to this, then I know ur dead._

There was just one text from Spencer, it said, _B says ur dead. Which is really his code for you being an idiot. If we have to come to Chicago, I'm gonna be pissed._

Jon took the plunge and dialed the one person in his band he thought would make the most sense, but also be the least likely to yell at him.

“Jon Walker!” Brendon cheered into the phone. “Spencer, cancel our plane tickets to Chicago. Jon is apparently alive. You’re alive, right? You’re not like calling me from the afterlife, or secretly been turned into a vampire?”

“No, I am definitely alive,” he smiled in the phone, caught by Brendon's infectious enthusiasm. 

“Then what is your excuse for ignoring us, Jon Walker?” Brendon said, trying to play if off as a joke. He’d known Brendon long enough though to know Brendon was kind of angry.  Maybe he was wrong about not being lectured by him.

“Yeah, uh, I’m sorry. I was just being really stupid.”

“And are you done being stupid?” Brendon asked. Sometimes Jon forgot that the shy, hyperactive kid Brendon pretended to be on the stage and in front of the cameras was just a front, and that sometimes Brendon understood him better than he did himself.

“Yeah, B, I’m done being stupid.”

“Good. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, Spencer is demanding I ask you what time your plane arrives. He says we may or may not pick you up, depending on how much you grovel and beg for our forgiveness.”

Before he could answer, he heard the rustle of clothing and Brendon crying ‘hey,’ before Spencer said, “I never said that.”

Jon knew he was lying. That definitely sounded like something Spencer would say, and he was definitely the kind of guy who wasn't afraid to say that to his face. But he also knew what Spencer's denial of a probable truth really meant.

 _You’re forgiven,_ Jon heard in the denial.

And maybe that meant forgiveness for everything.


	4. Ryan's Story

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am also putting these warnings here because some of them were not a part of the original tags, because honestly I didn’t know how this story was going to play out when I came up with the idea. Anyways, this chapter has extra warnings for homophobia from an OC, bullying, use of derogatory terms, some violence, child abuse, mentions of underage sex, and self-destructive behavior.

The thing was, Ryan still sometimes hurt himself.  It was nothing ever obvious. He didn’t drag razor blades across his arms, or burn himself. He never physically hurt himself at all, but the scars he gave himself still hurt all the same.

No, Ryan considered himself more self-destructive than self-harming, and he was unfortunately entirely aware of his tendencies, unlike most people who self-imploded. And even though he was 100 percent cognizant of his negative behavioral patterns, that did not stop him from finding a way to ruin his life every chance he got. ~~  
~~

He started self-bombing his life when he was just a kid. It began, he thought looking back, at Christmas when he was 10, the year he decided not to spend the holidays with his father. The Smiths invited him to their house and Ryan eagerly accepted, excited that he did not have to spend one more year pretending Christmas didn’t exist because his father yet again forgot about it.

At the Smith house, though, Christmas was everything Ryan thought it was supposed to be. They ate a big dinner on Christmas Eve, and then watched _A Christmas Story_ on repeat. He helped the twins set out cookies for Santa and carrots for the reindeer, before sitting outside of the twins’ bedroom hidden in the hallway as Ginger read _The Night Before Christmas_ out loud to them.

He’d like to say the twins woke him up on Christmas, but Ryan was wide awake the minute the sun began to rise. Still, he had his pride and pretended Jackie and Crystal woke him up when they jumped onto the bed he shared with Spencer, Jackie yelling about how Santa had come and they missed seeing him once again because Crystal wanted to go to bed and wouldn’t stay up later with her.  

They ate chocolate chip pancakes and bacon for breakfast that Ryan didn’t have to cook, and after, for the first time since his mom left, Ryan had a stocking and presents under the tree.

He spent the night again with the Smiths, playing with his new presents with Spencer, drinking Ginger’s homemade peppermint hot chocolate, eating lamb and not noodles from a box, spending the whole day watching Christmas movies.

It was the best Christmas he’d had in a long time.

Until he went home the day after.

There was a tree in the living room, one that hadn’t been there when he left for the Smith house on Christmas Eve. The beer bottles that normally lay scattered around the couch were gone, the living room uncharacteristically tidy. Messily wrapped in red paper with bows haphazardly placed on top and placed under the tree, were presents, each one addressed to him. He found his father, stone-cold sober for the first time in months, sitting at the kitchen table.

The hurt in his father’s eyes when he saw him walk in with a bag full of gifts from the Smiths punched a hole straight through his chest and grabbed hold of his heart, squeezing tighter and tighter until it hurt to breath.

They couldn’t meet each other’s eyes.

Before he could even say anything, his father calmly stood, walked out the door and didn’t come back until the next morning, blind drunk and mumbling about ungrateful kids.  Ryan left the presents untouched under the tree. In the morning, after his father crashed and stumbled through the house at 3 am, he found the presents sitting in the trash.

He never went to the Smith house for Christmas again.

Ryan wouldn’t say he planned it, he wasn’t that aware of his self-destructive behavior, but the next year he might have ruined Christmas on purpose. He made sure the fridge was stocked full of beer by stealing a can here and there for months, hiding them in his room, and then placing them all in the fridge on Christmas Eve. He did it completely on a whim, he swore. On Christmas Eve morning, on the kitchen table he left the box full of his mother’s pictures and the stuff she left behind. He did it because he had the sudden urge to see his mother’s face, he told himself. Every opportunity he could in the weeks preceding Christmas, Ryan made sure to act like a brat, reminding his father that he wished his mother was there or talking about how awesome Christmas at the Smiths’ was, small things he knew would hurt his father. At the time, he wasn’t aware of his bratty behavior. It was only in hindsight, he understood.

His father tried to remain sober at first, and then spectacularly failed after rifling through the box on the table and staring at pictures of his mother, of them when Ryan thought they might have been happy, for hours. Then his father drank until he blacked out, beat Ryan with his belt when he wouldn’t stop being a brat, wouldn’t stop reminding him of his failures, and then kept drinking.

His father passed out on the floor in a pile of his own vomit just after midnight and wouldn’t wake up. Ryan tried shaking him awake, tried pouring cold water over him, and even slapped his father.  He broke down crying, called an ambulance and spent his Christmas day in the hospital.

 _This is how Christmas is supposed to be_ , he thought.  

Things only got worse from there, because Ryan just didn't know how to stop fucking up his life.

At 16, Ryan tried to ruin the only friendship he had that mattered to him. Spencer was his only real friend, the one who stood by him no matter what, who defended him when no one else would, who listened when he cried or needed to vent, who let Ryan sleep on his floor or in his bed, and who was always there for him.

He didn’t deserve Spencer and his awesome friendship.

So he pulled away, stopped spending the night on Spencer’s air mattress or in his bed, stopped sitting with him at lunch, and stopped hanging out with him after school. _He’s better off without me,_ he told himself.

Spencer tried to push back, to force Ryan to maintain their friendship, but Ryan kept pulling away further and further until Spencer was too far away to help.

He fell in with a bad crowd instead, started hanging out with kids who cut school, stole shit from the local stores, graffitied personal property, smoked pot, drank alcohol and even drabbled in the harder drugs. They were the kind of kids who beat up other kids after school just for fun. Ryan never participated, never kicked or hit or stole things from any of the poor kids his friends terrorized, nor did he rifle through anyone’s backpack or yell dirty names at them, but he didn’t stop it from happening either, content with standing in the background and letting it go on.

Then one day in the parking lot after school his friends decided to go after Jerry, the only kid in their high school who was openly gay. One kid took his back pack and dumped everything on the ground, scattering Jerry’s things and kicking them under cars, into gum and even smeared one of his textbooks in a pile of dog shit. Someone else pushed Jerry into a car and punched him in the stomach. Then several of his ‘friends’ held Jerry down, tore off his shirt and wrote ‘fag’ in sharpie on his chest in big, black letters while the poor kid struggled and cried.

And Ryan did nothing to stop it.

But Spencer did.

The brave and loyal, but rarely ever reckless, Spencer  full-body tackled Baker, the leader of the gang and the kid currently drawing penises on Jerry’s chest, and then placed himself between Jerry and the rest of them after the poor kid managed to squirm his way free from the hands holding him down and half-way rise to his feet.

Spencer’s eyes widened when he recognized Ryan in the back of the group, but his mouth set in a determined line, his hands clenched into fists.

“Get out the way, Smith,” Baker sneered, knuckling blood away from his split lip where his face hit the pavement when Spencer tackled him. “This ain’t got nothin’ to do with you.”

Spencer’s face creased, boldness simmering on his tongue. “Since I’m gay too, I guess this does have something to do with me.”

Ryan had a moment to wonder how to save Spencer from getting his ass kicked, before Ms. Frost and Mr. Jacques, the gym teachers, came running out of the school, placing themselves in between Spencer and Jerry and Ryan and the rest of the gang, Ms. Frost yelling at Spencer because she told him to wait for her. Spencer never did anything reckless. Ryan should have known he would have brought back up.

Ms. Frost took one look at Jerry’s chest, which the poor kid was desperately trying to hide with his hands, and leveled Ryan and the gang with a glare that could melt Mount Everest. “Principal’s office, now,” she demanded, pointing in the direction of the school.

The rest of the gang rolled their eyes or swore under their breath as they were marched back into the building. But Ryan stayed back as long as he could, watching Spencer shake and start to fall apart.

“Spencer, you’re…”

“Yeah, I am,” he said with the same fierce determination, but his eyes were wet as he met Ryan’s eyes.

“I…I didn’t know.”

Spencer hunched his shoulders, face settling into a scowl. “Would it have made a difference if you had?” he asked, snatching Jerry’s shirt from the ground and handing it to the shaking kid.

“I—”

“George Ross, now,” Ms. Frost’s biting voice interrupted from across the parking lot. Instinctually, he turned to look in the direction of her voice. When he turned back to Spencer, he’d already turned his back to Ryan as he crouched on the ground, helping Jerry gather his things.

The school called his father to come pick him up. He waited outside the principal’s office for hours knowing he wouldn’t come. It gave him plenty of time to think, the only thing on his mind Spencer. He wondered if it made him a worse friend for not figuring it out on his own that Spencer was gay, or that Spencer hadn’t felt comfortable enough to tell him, that he wasn’t even around for Spencer to tell. He wondered if anyone else knew, if Spencer had told his parents, or his other friends, though he wasn’t sure who those might be. He wondered if Spencer had anyone to tell at all. 

Ryan should have been there for him.  

He wanted to be that understanding friend that Spencer could trust. Instead of doing the smart thing and begging for Spencer’s forgiveness and maybe talking about it together, he made an ill-advised trip to the Strip by himself to find out what it was like to be gay, what it was like for Spencer.

Finding some random guy to fuck him to earn back Spencer’s friendship may have been the dumbest idea he’d ever had. He wasn’t gay. He liked tits and clits, not dicks and asses.

He told himself he was doing this for Spencer, to understand where he was coming from so Spencer would feel comfortable talking about this with him. But Ryan knew that was a screwed up and nowhere near the real reason why.

He hoped the guy he picked would be a little rough, would hold him down and fuck him, and not care if Ryan enjoyed it, just take what he wanted. The guy wasn’t too much older than him, clean shaven, with eyes like wild grass. He turned out to be gentle, taking his time to prep him, sliding in slow, giving as much as he was receiving. The guy made Ryan feel wanted, made him feel almost loved in the moment, and he even gave Ryan a pretty spectacular blow job.

Ryan hated every minute of it.

He wasn’t gay, but Ryan insisted it wasn’t a big deal either. Then the guy handed him a $50 bill and asked if he could find Ryan at the same corner next weekend. It hadn’t occurred to him until that moment that anyone might mistake him for a hooker.

He made it a few more days before he broke down completely.

He stole a six-pack of beer from his father and drank until his brain felt fuzzy and his fingers tingled. Then he stumbled into Spencer’s room in the middle of the night, waking up Spencer as he crashed into his desk.

Ryan told him all about the guy on the Strip, but instead of being the understanding caring best friend, Ryan may have said he didn’t like it and he didn’t understand Spencer’s choices. He partially redeemed himself, he thought, by saying he still loved Spencer and he was sorry, sorry, so, so sorry that he pushed Spencer away, sorry he fell into a bad crowd, sorry he didn’t stop them from bullying kids.

“But I wouldn’t have let them beat you up. I would have done something, I swear,” he insisted, his words only slightly slurred.

Spencer let him talk until his words ran out, but when he finally crashed to a grinding halt, he didn’t get the full Spencer smile, the rare one he brought out only for special occasions, that he expected. “If you really mean that,” Spencer said with a smile that felt sad, “come back when you’re sober and say it again.”

Ryan didn’t go back.

That could have been the end of that, the unusual tale of Spencer and Ryan ending in an unassuming parking lot. Except Baker, as retribution for getting him into trouble, told the entire school that Spencer was gay, and made it his personal mission to make Spencer suffer.

Spencer was spared most of the bullying Jerry underwent on a daily basis because he was a pretty cool person and most people liked him. Plus, it helped that on the rare occasions in the past when people did attempt to bully Spencer, he acted pretty bored with the entire affair, completely unphased with the opinions of others, which generally sucked the fun out of it for the bullies.

It was, however, a Catholic school, so there were more than a few religious nutbags who called Spencer derogatory names and wrote nasty things in sharpie on his locker. And one girl even told Spencer they _had_ to date because she could save his soul.

Then there was Baker and his gang who pushed Spencer around in the hallways during school, and decided one day to take him out back and beat the shit out of him. Ryan wasn’t there for the start of it, when they apparently ambushed Spencer on his way out of the school and dragged him to a secluded area behind it. He heard it from his lab partner, who may have had a crush on him, who heard it from her friend, who heard it from her friend. Ryan had never sprinted that fast in his life before.

When he got there, Spencer was on the ground. Blood dripped from his nose and onto his shirt and his left eye was starting to swell shut. But he still stubbornly rose to his feet, rubbed away the blood with his hand, and smeared it across Baker’s shirt.

“You little sh—”

“Hey!” Ryan cried, sprinting to Baker’s side and skidding to a halt.

“Ryan,” Baker smirked and dropped the fist he was about to hit Spencer with. “Do you want a turn?”

Spencer’s expression was completely closed off, and to anyone else he looked like he was simply waiting in line at the DMV. But Ryan could see the fear and the touch of betrayal on his face.

“Yeah, I do,” he said, stepping towards Spencer until they were nose to nose and watching his good eye widen, before Ryan turned around and punched Baker as hard as he could in the face. Then he grabbed Spencer’s wrist and ran for it.

Baker got expelled, because no one doubted Spencer’s word when he reported the incident to the principal, and because Spencer’s mother took one look at her son’s face and threw an hour long fit in the principal’s office. Ryan narrowly avoided expulsion because Spencer insisted that Ryan punched Baker out of self-defense.

He somehow ended up in Spencer’s room that night, lying on the air mattress Ginger set up for him.

Spencer hadn’t said two words to him the entire day, or in weeks for that matter, but lying on his bed, facing Ryan, he said, “thanks, for, you know.”

Hearing Spencer say that made Ryan feel worse than he did the day he came home after Christmas to find his father sober and waiting for him.

He scrubbed a hand across his eyes, and deliberately turned away from Spencer to face the wall. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you before.” he said, hoping Spencer understood what he meant. "I'm sorry I didn't know."

It was silent long enough that Ryan thought Spencer fell asleep, until he heard his voice, small and timid and unlike anything he’d ever heard from his best friend before. “It’s not your fault. I was too afraid to tell anyone,” he admitted. “People kind of suck, you know, and I wasn’t going to say anything to anyone. I didn’t mean to say anything in the parking lot. It just sort of slipped out.”

“I’m glad I know,” Ryan said, shuffling back around until he could almost make Spencer out in the dark.

“It’s just, I don’t know. Do you, do you think the kids at school are right, and that there is something wrong me?”

“Hey,” Ryan said, fighting his way free from the blankets around him. He stood and nudged Spencer over until he could slide into the bed with him. “There’s nothing wrong with you. They’re assholes, okay. You’re pretty much the best person I know.”

“Thanks,” Spencer said, clearing his throat. His eyes were wet, but Ryan knew Spencer well enough to know he would never let those tears fall.

The next day, Ryan spent the money the guy who fucked him gave him on a new part for Spencer’s drum that he’d been begging his mom to buy him for months. He told Spencer he got it for free, and Spencer accepted the lie for what it was.

After that, Ryan got his best friend back, well mostly. While most things stayed the same, there were small changes in their relationship that bothered Ryan, a distance that wasn’t there before, and Ryan had no one to blame, but himself. Spencer started hesitating to tell him things. He would look at Ryan for a long moment, his eyes searching, before shaking his head and remaining silent. He wouldn’t talk about being gay with Ryan either. If Ryan tried to bring it up, asking Spencer if he thought anyone was attractive, or asking him about his experiences, or what celebrities he considered hot, Spencer immediately shut down the conversation every time. He thought it was just the way Spencer was about the whole thing.

But then Brendon came along, and Spencer never hesitated to talk to Brendon about those kind of things.

Brendon was…well, Ryan didn’t quite know what to make of him at first. He was eager to please, hyperactive, talked too much and constantly said awkward shit. Ryan wouldn’t say he hated Brendon, but he definitely didn’t like him either. But, Brendon was better at guitar than Ryan, and, it turned out, he was one hell of a singer. The band was the one thing Ryan was determined not to sabotage, so he couldn’t let the opportunity Brendon afforded them slip through his fingers.

Plus, he saw the way Spencer looked at Brendon, and yeah, he kind of still owed Spencer everything and more.

Spencer and Brendon spent a lot of time together, not that Ryan was jealous or anything. At least not until he overheard a conversation between them, when they thought he was passed on the Smith living room floor after a movie marathon. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was playing on the tv, when Spencer whispered, “Harrison Ford, in his prime, was one hot motherfucker. I don’t care how old he is now, I’d still do him.”

He’d watched this movie maybe 10 times already with Spencer since he found out he was gay, and not once had his best friend told him that.

“Star Wars era Harrison Ford was pretty hot,” Brendon agreed. “But now dude, really? With the old man gut and the wrinkly old man cock?”

“Harrison Ford is still a bad ass,” Spencer said, and Brendon giggled, the kind of sound he only made when Spencer tickled him. “He’s probably still an animal in bed. I’d let him fuck me, wrinkly old cock and all.” When he dared to open his eyes just a peak, he saw Brendon leaning into Spencer, head on his shoulder, Spencer’s arm around his waist. Ryan used to cuddle with Spencer like that, before…but they haven’t since.

The next morning, Ryan drove Brendon home, but stopped him from leaving his car with a hand clamped down around his wrist. Brendon glanced at the hand on his arm, before staring at Ryan like the pre-calc homework he could never quite figure out.

“Did,” he sighed and stopped, wondering if he was spilling Spencer’s secret. Considering the conversation he overheard between the two of them, he assumed Brendon had to know.  “Did Spencer tell he was uh, gay?”

“Yes,” Brendon said, infuriatingly raising one eyebrow, face still drawn in confusion. “But I already knew. It was kind of obvious.”

“Obvious, yeah,” Ryan said, releasing Brendon’s wrist.

Next practice, Brendon became their lead singer. The fights started the moment Brendon opened his mouth to sing. It was mostly just Ryan yelling at Brendon for not singing his lyrics right, or arguing about a key change Brendon suggested for one of their songs that even Brent could tell sounded better, but Ryan still threw a fit about. Brendon rarely stood up for himself, and on even less occasions fought back, no matter how much Ryan pushed. Once, Ryan even got in his face, and Brendon actually flinched, backing away from Ryan until his back hit the wall, and turning his face away like he expected to be hit. Spencer stood to his feet so quickly, he knocked over one of his cymbals. He declared practice over and dragged Brendon out of their practice space and into his car, barely giving Brendon enough time to grab his things. Wherever they were going, Ryan was not invited.

Brent frowned at him and said, “Dude,” shaking his head and packing his bass.

At their next practice, Brendon came in and told them all he’d decided to go to college. He was going to quit the band after high school and become a hair dresser.

Spencer cornered Ryan after practice, grip tight and desperate on his arm, words hushed and hurried. “I know what you’re trying to do to Brendon. I swear to God if you don’t fix it, I will….I don’t know, but please fix this. Please, don’t fuck this up.” It was the first time Ryan ever heard Spencer beg for anything.

But Ryan only knew how to do one thing, and that was break his fragile relationships beyond repair. He didn’t know the first thing about fixing them.

“You can’t leave the band,” Ryan blurted out after driving Brendon home, once again preventing him from leaving his car by capturing his wrist.

Brendon tugged on his wrist, trying to dislodge Ryan’s grip with his free hand. Ryan subconsciously tightened his grip. “Ryan, let go.”

“No, I’m serious, you can’t leave. This band is gonna be something, I know it, okay? We’re gonna be huge. It’d be stupid to leave us to be a hairdresser.”

 “Then I guess I’m stupid,” he said, wincing when Ryan held on tighter.

“Please, the band needs you,” he insisted. “I need you.”

Brendon stilled for a moment, before making another desperate attempt to free his wrist. “Dude, I’m not interested in guys like that."

“I didn’t mean, I didn’t,” he blushed and stuttered, releasing his grip on Brendon. “I’m not either. I didn’t mean it like that,” he finally managed to say.

“Okay, then what did you mean?” he asked, body turned towards the open door, ready to spring from Ryan’s car.

Ryan noisily sighed and smacked his forehead on his steering wheel, letting it rest there. “I believe in this band. I believe we really could be something, and you’re better at this stuff than I am,” he admitted, though the words felt like acid leaving his mouth. “We can’t be anything without you. I fuck a lot of shit up, but I don’t want to fuck up this.” _I’m sorry,_ was on the tip of his tongue, but he swallowed the words down. “Besides Spencer will kick my ass if I don’t convince you to stay.”

Something in Brendon’s expression softened at the mention of Spencer and Ryan thought _not interested in guys my ass._ “Fine,” Brendon huffed and pushed himself from the car.

“So you’ll be at practice on Friday,” he called after him, as Brendon strode towards his home.

“Yeah, I’ll be there,” he replied without turning around

Ryan sighed in relief and vowed to try harder, to stop yelling at Brendon so much and to be fucking nice for once.

Spencer and Brendon disappeared at the beginning of the next practice and returned 20 minutes later, both with that small private smile they only reserved for the other. He completely forgot his vow and blurted out, “Are you two fucking?" God, he really needed to learn to put a filter on his mouth. Brendon looked at him like someone just stripped him naked and pushed him onto a stage with an audience full of the members of his church, while Spencer flat out glared. Neither answered the question, but no one stormed out of the practice space either.

He managed to make it a whole five minutes before he broke his vow a second time, and opened his big fat mouth. Brendon looked like someone just kicked him in the nuts after Ryan finished his tirade and Spencer growled, actually growled at him.  Ryan looked sheepishly at the ground, mumbled an apology, and vowed to try harder.

Ryan kept breaking his vow, though, kept forgetting, kept trying to dig barbs into everyone he knew with his biting wit and sarcasm. But for the first time since he was lucky enough to snatch Spencer, Brendon stayed. There was no more talk about college, or leaving the band, and he started to put just as much effort into their songs as Ryan did. He insisted on invading Ryan’s personal space, too, on hanging out and being his _friend_ , until Ryan had no choice, but to accept Brendon as an anomaly in his life, one he hoped, even the cursed Ryan Ross couldn’t sabotage.

He couldn’t say the same for his relationship with Amelia, the first girl he ever loved. She was the kind of girl who smiled with her whole face, her beautiful brown eyes lighting up like stars on a clear night. Her soft dyed blonde hair cascaded in untamed waves over her pale shoulders, and her lips were as soft as silk and tasted like strawberries. They first bonded over their obsession with makeup, and then he fell hard for her poetry, despite the excessive flower and butterfly metaphors. For the first time in his life, he started thinking in terms like dating and long-term and taking her to the prom and maybe even love, instead of the usual getting laid and running far away.

Of course as soon as the word love first snuck into his head, sliding through his body and setting up permanence in his gut that nervously fluttered every time he looked at her, it wasn’t long after that Amelia caught him cheating.

The ideas of love and future and happiness meshed together faded with her smile, and Ryan could breathe a little easier. Through the years, time and time again, Ryan ruined every meaningful relationship with a beautiful women the same exact way.

Love, after all, was only for those who deserved it.

*

His phone rang, _Unknown_ stamped above a set of numbers he knew by heart. The calls from this number never stopped coming, but with Christmas fast approaching, they came a little bit more often. His thumb hovered the accept call button, until it stopped ringing and clicked over to voicemail.  He slipped the phone back into his pocket, then took it out and turned it off for good measure.

“I can’t believe we’re actually getting more than a few days off,” Spencer said, plopping down on the couch in the back lounge of their bus next to Ryan and grabbing the remote from his hand.

“It’s just a week,” Ryan said, resisting the urge to rest his head on Spencer’s shoulder. He wasn’t Brendon. “And it’s only cuz of the holidays.”

Spencer shrugged his shoulders and settled more firmly on the couch, leaning against the side, putting his feet in Ryan’s lap and purposefully flicking Ryan’s notebook with his toes until Ryan put it down. “What are you doing for Christmas this year?”

Oh, so that’s why he wanted Ryan’s attention so bad. Well no fucking way. He wasn’t talking about this with Spencer again.

“So, you and Brendon, huh,” he said, smacking Spencer’s feet with his notebook. “How does that work?”

Spencer’s bitch face implied that Ryan had, yet again, put his foot in mouth and crossed the line drawn in the sand between appropriate conversation and talking like a jackass.

If he was anyone else besides Spencer or Brendon, he probably would have used the foot in Ryan’s lap to kick him in the balls, before storming away. Unfortunately, Spencer knew him enough to know Ryan got a tiny bit defensive when cornered and tended to say crap he didn’t mean, and this was, by far, not the worst fucked up shit he’d ever said to him. That just meant he couldn’t weasel his way out this conversation, though.

“You know, you’re always welcome to celebrate with us.”

Ryan rolled his eyes. Spencer, and Ginger, had been telling him the same exact thing for years. Though he never accepted, he was still secretly grateful for their invite.

“Or you could answer the next time your father calls, and spend it with him.”

Ryan hid his surprise by ticking Spencer’s feet, a decision he instantly regretted when Spencer jerked away, accidentally hitting him in the balls.

“Shit,” he hissed, curling in on himself and hitting Spencer with his notebook again.

“Your own fucking fault, dude,” Spencer said, laughing at him. Ryan stood from the couch, stretching his arms over his head and cracking his back. “Just don’t spend Christmas alone again, okay?”

He fled to the bunks, intent on being alone, but Brendon was there, lying in his own bunk, staring blankly at the ceiling. It’d been almost two weeks since the incident on the Fall Out Boy bus, and though Brendon gained back some of the energy he lost after that night, he hadn’t completely rebounded. It almost hurt looking at him, at the dark circles under his eyes, despite how much time he spent in his bunks, and the vacant look in his eyes, the ghosts of his past sucking the life out of him.

He wondered what the others saw when they looked at Ryan, wondered if his ghosts looked like that too.

Brendon acknowledged him with a nod of his head and turned back to stare at the ceiling of his bunk. It was wrong, all wrong. Brendon wasn’t supposed to be like this, and Ryan wasn’t supposed to be the one to notice, to care this much about it. He bit his lip, and then decided, ‘fuck it,’ before pushing Brendon over and crawling into his bunk.

Brendon’s eyes widened in surprise, but he slide over without protest, letting Ryan in.

“Hey,” Ryan said, settling on his side and propping his head up on his hand. Brendon smiled in reply, the vacant look in his eyes disappearing just for a moment in deference to mirth. “Pete invited us to hang out on their bus again tonight. You gonna go?”

And just like that, the mirth slid from his face as he shook his head and turned to face the wall.

“Too weird?” Ryan asked, because yeah, hanging around with the other band after everything he told them, was probably the most awkward experience in his life. Jon and Spencer were right behind them in that sentiment, but no one avoided Fall Out Boy quite like Brendon had done these past few weeks.

Brendon shrugged. “It’s just, everyone’s treating me differently now that they know. Even Spence and Jon. It’s not like _I’ve_ changed, though. I know they care, but it gets old, you know?”

Ryan had plenty of experience with that. He’d had a lifetime of Ginger letting him stay over on school nights despite the Smith family rules, and people letting him get away with all sorts of shit he shouldn’t have gotten away with simply because they suspected his father might have hit him. Sometimes he pushed the boundaries, tested exactly what he could get away with. And other times he wished those people would fuck off and leave him alone. “Yeah, I know.”

Brendon twisted around to face him, eyes searching Ryan’s face. “How do you deal with it?”

“I don’t know.”  

“Yeah, I was worried that might be the case,” he said, grabbing Ryan’s arm and pulling it closer, so he could cuddle with Ryan.

He supposed he could have been comforting in that moment, expressed some platitude like ‘it gets better.’ But it really didn’t, and he couldn't lie to Brendon about this.

“You ever wonder, what you would say if you saw him again?” He turned his gaze sharply towards Brendon, but the younger teen kept his face hidden in Ryan’s shoulder.

“Yes,” he said, knowing this was something Brendon needed to hear. It got better, over time, but Ryan often thought of exactly what he would say to his father if, when he spoke to him again. He hadn’t talked to him since the day he told him he quit college, and that conversation hadn’t exactly gone well.

“I do, too,” Brendon admitted, forcing the words out into Ryan’s shoulder. “If I ever saw the guy that…I think about it all the time. I’d probably chicken out, though, if it actually happened.”

Brendon’s flashes of insight always hit him the hardest, and Ryan told himself it was because he never expected it from him, that he let himself get fooled too much by Brendon’s fake persona. But the things Brendon said in moments like this, hit a little too close to home, in a way that only someone who understand what he went through could do.

It made him wonder, and that sort of, maybe, terrified him.

“Well anyways, thanks for not treating me any differently,” Brendon said.

Ryan nodded and turned his head away, his thoughts racing. Now that Brendon brought it up, he couldn’t stop imagining what he would say, what would happen? Would his father be drunk? Would he yell at Ryan, tell him music was a waste of time and he was wasting his life, and try to hit him again?

Would Ryan let his father hit him?

The next day, the phone rang again, the same number flashing on his screen. _“I’d probably chicken out,”_ Brendon has said, and it took until now for Ryan to realize that was exactly what he’d been doing. All these years, he hadn’t been angry or upset with his father.

He’d been scared.

“Ryan?” a familiar voice emanated from the speakers with what almost sounded like relief before Ryan even realized he'd accepted the call.

He took a shaky breath, and said, “Hi, Dad.”

*

Ryan didn’t expect much when he pulled into his childhood home for the first time in two years. More paint had chipped off the siding in the last few years, the stone steps were more weather worn and cracked, and the wooden floor of the front porch more rotten, a few pieces gone. It threateningly dipped under his weight, the old wood creaking. None of it was a good sign.

There was no tree in the living room, and empty beer bottles still lined the couch. It smelled like a bar, like cigarettes and stale beer, the floor suspiciously sticky.

“Ryan,” his father stood from the couch and shuffled his feet as he ran a hand through his greasy hair. “I wasn’t sure if you’d come.”

“Yeah,” Ryan replied, kicking over a few  beer bottles accidentally as he dragged his suitcase into the house.

“I uh, I didn’t decorate, because I wasn’t sure,” his father said, shoving his shaking hands in his pockets, “but we could go get a tree or something, if you wanted.”

“No, it’s fine,” Ryan said.

His father’s shoulder slumped, but he brushed it off and headed towards his room.

“It’s exactly the way you left it,” his father said, holding the door to Ryan’s room open for him.

He shut the door in his father’s face and let his weight lean against it. He forced himself to breath calmly, repeating _I can do this,_ until he mustered enough courage to leave the room again.

He imagined confronting his father thousands of times, but now that the moment was actually here, he couldn’t think of a single to say.

During dinner, his father asked about his friends, about the tour, about his music, all the obligatory things a parent should ask, and Ryan dutifully answered. But after, as his father handed him a sloppily wrapped present, Ryan stared at it, and instead of taking it, blurted out, “Why did you hit me?”

His father staggered back into his arm chair, the present still in his hands.

“Ryan, I don’t…”

“Do you even remember doing it?”

“Yes,” his father said, clutching the present in his hand until it warped. “Yes, I’m sorry, Ryan. I shouldn’t have done that to you. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want an apology,” Ryan said, pressing his fingers into his eyes. “I want to know why.”

“I don’t have a good reason.”

“Then tell me the bad one.”

“I think, every time I looked at you, I saw what a terrible father I was, I saw all of my failures and it just made me so angry, that I took it out on you,” his father said, releasing his grip on the present and attempting to smooth out the wrinkles in the package and return it to its original shape.

“So it wasn’t me, you didn’t…didn’t hate me?”

“No, kid. It wasn’t your fault.”

Something inside Ryan broke, he could feel it shatter, could feel the sharp pieces spreading through his body, digging lines of fire and pain wherever they touched. “Okay,” he said, peeling the present from his father’s hand.

His father offered him a real smile when Ryan dug a present out of his bag and handed it to them. It didn’t matter what the presents were, though, only that they existed.

They stayed up late, watching crappy Christmas specials until early in the morning, his father staring at his beer bottles, but refusing to drink.

They talked, and they actually laughed, and for the first time in as long as he can remember, Ryan enjoyed his father’s company, as they reminisced about some of the happier times.

When his father died less than a year later, these were the moments, and this was the man he remembered.


	5. Brendon's Story

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just want to say thank you to everyone who read, reviewed or kudo-ed this story. I know I post entirely too many warnings that nobody probably reads, but I'm going to post one more. If you remember the first chapter, everyone had a flashback to their traumatic event, except for Brendon. That was intentional, because the flashback takes place in this chapter, and it gets a little graphic, so you are properly forewarned. I also want to point out that there is a non-linear narrative, so the events from beginning to end of this story aren't necessarily in chronological order. For example, the last scene in this chapter takes place long before the events at the beginning of the chapter. Also, my character's opinions are not my own, nor are they the opinions of these people in real life. And no offense to the Mormon religion or anything.
> 
> I know I left some unresolved issues in this story. That was also intentional, as I hope to write a sequel. If you read between the lines, there are hints towards the sequel in this chapter.

After the…what happened, it became harder to believe in God.

The morning after, his bishop lectured on temptation and how to resist or there would be consequences. Brendon shifted uncomfortably in his seat the entire time, knowing it wasn’t just the horrible pain shooting up his spine that prevented him from sitting still. He felt like his pastor spoke directly to him that morning, like he knew what happened and was lecturing Brendon on his mistakes, like he was pointing his finger at Brendon saying ‘haha, that’s what you get for liking boys too.’ He’d given into temptation, he’d paid the ultimate price. Brendon had no one to blame, but himself, his bishop said.  

The next week, his bishop preached on love, like he hadn’t spent an hour the week before denouncing the love between every same-sex couple on the planet. He started to wonder how both sermons could be right, wondering how they fit together. But the more he thought about it, the more he realized they didn’t.  Every week after, he sat in church, listening to his bishop preach on and on about what the Book of Mormon said, thinking it made absolutely no sense. But somewhere in the back of his mind, he was really thinking a steady mantra of _why, why, why?_   _If God is real, why did this happen to me?_

There was no answer.

So he stopped going to church, stopped believing in God, and stopped wondering why.

*

Brendon fell face first in love with Spencer like a contestant in a Japanese game show hurdling into muddy disgusting water after a sneak ninja attack. In other words, it was a painful surprise and not something he wanted to talk about.

He hadn’t even noticed at first. Maybe if he had, he could have stopped himself from falling. But somewhere after that first eloquent exchange of ‘Hi’ in Spencer’s grandmother’s living room, and crashing on Spencer’s lumpy air mattress for a week straight when things got too bad at home, and making the CD and touring, Brendon realized he was so far gone.

In fact, he remembered the exact moment it registered in his conscious brain that he wanted more from Spencer than just friendship. He’d been sick with the flu during their first tour, but he was still determined to put on a good show. The show drained him of his energy, like pulling the plug in a bathtub. He ended up standing on the stage longer than anyone else, while the techs for the next band stared at him funny, left wondering how he was going to muster up enough energy from the scraps he had left to get himself off the stage and into their green room.  Spencer rescued him by handing him a water bottle and some pills, and leading him to the couch in their green room with a steady hand his hip. Spencer forced him to lie down, letting Brendon rest his head in his lap. And in that moment when he looked up and saw Spencer staring fondly down at him, one subconscious thought managed to worm its way free into the forefront of his mind.

_I really want to touch his dick right now._

He never intended to act upon his feelings, even after it became apparent Spencer liked him back.

Because touching Spencer’s dick by giving him a blow job, fine. Brendon could explore that particular imagination all day. He’d embarrassingly jerked off to that fantasy more than a couple of times. But imagining Spencer’s dick touching him in certain other ways made him want to vomit. Therefore, Brendon was perfectly content fucking only women and keeping his thoughts of naked Spencer entirely to himself.

Unfortunately Brendon’s plans never went accordingly, because Brendon was the kind of person who jumped in feet first and did stupid shit without thinking about it. If he thought about it too much, he’d think himself right out of doing anything. On the one hand, if he didn’t always jump first, he wouldn’t have been….but on the other hand, jumping feet first gave him Panic, gave him a music career and a CD, a comfortable living and fame, friends who cared, and most importantly, his recklessness ended up giving him Spencer.

Spencer asked, he said yes without fretting too much about how all the ways it could go wrong, and that was that.

Spencer was sort of the perfect boyfriend, though the sunny filter of a new relationship may have clouded his judgement. The best thing about dating Spencer was that nothing changed. They were still best friends, they just added kissing and then hand jobs and then blowjobs to the fray.  Brendon maybe sort of kind didn’t want to give Spencer back to the friendship zone he pulled him from. Spencer made him forget he was just some stupid kid with ADHD. Spencer made him feel loved, like someone listened and actually cared about what he had to say, like his life mattered and his flaws didn’t. Spencer made him feel like he wasn’t damaged.

He wanted to keep that feeling, to keep Spencer, in the forever with marriage and puppies kind of way. And if that meant putting out, well, he had to try everything to keep Spencer his, right?

He couldn’t think of it that way. Brendon _wanted_ to try, he really did. Even if the memories slithering through the back of his mind, crept up on him at the mere _thought_ of trying. His mind usually flinched away from the memories, the door slamming shut between _him_ and _them_ in a vain attempt to protect himself. The memories _itched_ , though, scratched at the back of his mind, a constant scrape of nails across a chalkboard.  Just the thought of sex made the screeching louder, pushed the memories forward harder until he  was drowning, flapping his arms and legs in sea of memories trying to stay afloat, but he was tired, so, so tired of fighting, and sinking to the bottom couldn’t be that bad, right?

The feeling of love that Spencer offered was usually the hand that pushed through the water and dragged Brendon back to the surface, but not this time.

Instead, he maybe smoked two joints, definitely stealing one from Jon, just to calm down enough to talk to Spencer about it.   

Except the words wouldn’t come. He straddled Spencer’s waist instead, and pinned him down with his gaze. “I want to try,” Brendon said, pasting on his best seductive smirk.

Spencer kept his expression blank. Resting his hands on Brendon’s thighs, he slid them up across smooth pale skin to cup his ass, fingers slipping into the cleft.

Brendon hid his wince in another smirk and ground his hips down.

Something tipped Spencer off – maybe he didn’t hide that wince as well as he thought, or maybe he was shaking and didn’t realize it, maybe his smirk was imperfect – so he slid his hands up Brendon’s sides, placing them on his shoulders so he could pull Brendon forward until their foreheads touched. “No,” Spencer said, placing a chaste kiss on his lips.

Brendon did flinch at that, and tried to pull away, only Spencer wouldn’t let him.

“Hey, hey,” Spencer said, wrapping his arms around him and pulling Brendon down to his chest. “It’s okay. It’s not your fault.”

Brendon pressed his lips together because it kind of was his fault, but he leaned into the embrace, pressing his chest to Spencer’s, accepting the comfort. ~~  
~~

They’d been dating long enough, but Brendon still couldn’t take that final step. He wanted to give this to Spencer, but he was still too much of a wimp to even get past the first step. It’d been almost five years. He should be over it already, he should be able to have sex with his boyfriend. He should…

 Spencer was going to leave him. It was just a matter of time.

Brendon didn’t know how to fix this. 

 “I could blow you instead,” he said, wincing at how shaky his voice sounded.

“Not right now,” Spencer said tightening his hold on Brendon. He hid his wince in Spencer’s shoulder, unable to stop himself from wondering when Spencer was going to man up and tell Brendon he didn’t want him anymore. But Spencer must have felt the wince, because he pulled Brendon up, making him face him. “If it never happens, that’s okay, Brendon.”

He couldn’t help the snort of denial.

“I mean it,” Spencer said, cupping his jaw and kissing his nose.

Brendon scrunched up his face, ignoring the stinging in his eyes. “I just want to be good for you. I want to make this good for you.”

Spencer’s body went rigid beneath him. “Brendon, you…you know, our relationship, it’s not about the sex, right?”

Brendon kept his mouth shut, because he knew Spencer didn’t mean that. Everything was about sex in this world, everything, including their entire fucking CD, and each lyric he sang to the crowds every night. The stupid drinking games they played with The Academy Is, the advertisements for all the clothes they wore and the beer they drank, the movies they watched and the books they read, half of the conversations he had with his friends, everything always ended up about sex.

“You don’t believe me?” And God, why did Spencer have to say it like that, like Brendon hurt his feelings? He just wanted to give Spencer everything.

“It’s just, it’s hard…” he said, pressing his fingers into his eyes to stop the threat of tears. He wasn’t going to cry about this, not again. “It’s hard for me to believe that.”

 _You’re such a good little fuck,_ he still remembered the words hissed into his ear that night. _That ass is the only reason anyone would ever want you._

“Hey, it’s okay,” Spencer said, rubbing one hand in soothing circles on his back. “Don’t cry.”

“I’m not,” he insisted, burying his face into Spencer’s shoulder.

“I know it’s hard to believe,” Spencer said, pressing a kiss to Brendon’s hair, “but I like you, just you. That’s all I need.”

“No one likes just me,” he admitted, though the words were mumbled into Spencer’s shirt in hopes he wouldn’t hear it. ‘Just Brendon’ was kind of annoying, he knew that. He talked too much about the unimportant things, and not enough about the important things. He was twitchy, and had ADHD, and couldn’t sit still to save his life unless he was high on pot. He held things in, like little things that annoyed him or big things like when someone hurt his feelings. And then he exploded when it got too much, usually at the wrong person, and the wrong time. He wasn’t that smart, and he said awkward shit during interviews, saying 'that's awesome' entirely too much. Just because he could play a few instruments, and wrote a few melodies, didn’t make him like a genius with music. He wasn’t that great, even his own parents couldn’t stand him and almost kicked him out of the house. And Jon just tolerated him, and Ryan might actually hate him and Zack was paid to like him and….

Spencer sighed and tightened his arms enough to make Brendon squeak. “That’s bullshit,” Spencer said. “You can stop freaking out, okay, cuz I like you just you. And I’m not going anywhere, no matter what.”

“Okay,” Brendon said, but even to his own ears it didn’t sound very convincing.

“Brendon, I…” Spencer said as the hand rubbing his back stilled for a second, before it started back up again. “I can’t promise I’ll never hurt you, because we’re definitely going to fight, and I’m bound to say something stupid and hurtful.”

“It’s inevitable,” Brendon agreed, smirking into Spencer’s shoulder so he could feel it.

“Shut up, I’m trying to be profound,” Spencer said, pinching him in the side. “I just, I promise to never get mad if you tell me no, or to get impatient. And I promise to never hurt you like that, okay?”

“Okay,” Brendon agreed, and this time it at least sounded convincing.

Spencer tensed beneath him, his muscles going taught, his hand rubbing Brendon’s back a little harder. “You know, don’t take this the wrong way, but uh, after the whole thing with my uncle, my parents made me see a therapist. And I hated it at the time, I thought it was pointless and useless and stupid, but now I realize it really helped me, and I think it could help you too.”  

 “I’ll think about it,” Brendon said, and he meant it. Therapy could be a good thing. It certainly couldn’t make things worse.

“Brendon, did you smoke my…” Jon said, and Brendon turned his head away from Spencer’s shoulder to face him. Jon stopped dead when he saw Brendon’s face and what he assumed were red rimmed and wet eyes, though he definitely was not crying. He felt Spencer shift, a small subtle movement, and then Jon said, “Sorry, sorry,” his flip flops slapping against the floor as he retreated.

He violently squashed the anger that threatened to bubble and boil over. Before that night, Jon would have bitched Brendon out for stealing his weed. He wanted to chase after Jon, to shake him and scream ‘stop treating me differently, stop treating me like I’m about to break.’

They all had something shitty happen to them, but no one treated the rest of his band differently. Pete didn’t go out of his way to spend time with the others, Patrick didn’t sit down and just talk about anything and everything with Ryan, or Jon, or Spencer at a drop of a hat, Joe didn’t go all guard dog and scare creepy people away with the power of his glare for anyone else, and Andy didn’t treat anyone outside of Fall Out Boy like his children, except Brendon. Jon would have kicked Ryan in the balls for stealing his weed.  Brendon had seen, first hand, Jon kick Ryan in the balls for stealing his weed. Spencer, well, he was Spencer and he’d always treated Brendon differently. Ryan was the only one that understood he didn’t want things to change.

He hated this, and he wanted to hate them. Except he wasn’t so sure he wasn’t about to shatter.  So he let this weird whatever it was carry on.

The disastrous month spent in the cabin in the woods was the turning point that changed everything, and not just his relationships, but his life and everything in it. It was also the event that pushed him and Spencer past the final hurdle, and the catalyst that nearly destroyed their relationship for good.

The drugs, those fucking drugs saved their relationship and ruined it all in the same breath.

Brendon enjoyed smoking pot. He liked the way it made him feel.  It took the memories of that night and buried them deep in the folds of his brain where he didn’t have to think about them anymore. Pot made him feel calm like nothing else ever did. Zannies were like that too.

He assumed all drugs worked that way. Then Ryan slipped them all acid in the cabin, and he found out the hard way that wasn’t true.

It didn’t matter what it was – a tab of acid, a line of coke, some random pills, or whatever the fuck else was handed to him in the month he barely remembered – they all took hold of those memories and shoved them to the forefront of his mind where they played like a slideshow on repeat.

He remembered every detail with such clarity, he was sure it was happening all over again each time the drugs took hold. It left him shaking in the corner, paranoia spewing from his mouth. But coming down was worse; forgotten pains rushing through him, the feel of hands holding him down, the burn of a foot connecting with his chest, the agony of being violated. So he chased each low with a fresh high until the days blurred together into one nightmare.

The songs torn from Brendon in those weeks, filled with words of hate and pain and powerlessness, set to dark melodies in low minor tones that left you reeling, like the love of your life just shattered your heart, put fear in his bands’ eyes. He placed the shattered pieces of himself in their hands with those songs, and they had no clue how to handle that, except to gently hold their burdens and carry on as if nothing changed.

In the end, Ryan burned his guitar ‘alive’ because it wasn’t making the sounds he wanted.  Spencer started running down the halls screaming nonsense, and Jon didn’t sleep for three straight days. But when Ryan gracelessly plopped his skinny ass on Brendon’s lap, and he started drowning in the feeling of hands holding him down, hyperventilating until he passed out, only to come to wedged into a corner with Spencer’s hands hovering over him and concern plastered across his face, they knew it was time to end their foray into Wonderland.

Brendon called Zack before they left the cabin. Maybe it was their years of friendship and the fact that he was totally Zack’s favorite, or maybe it was the begging and crying he thought he might have done on the phone, but Zack agreed to babysit him in his home while he got sober. Brendon knew what secrets he might reveal in the process, and he needed someone he could trust to handle them.

The others all followed him to his house and decided to quit the hard stuff cold turkey with him. It wasn’t his fault Zack had to babysit all four of them, and if Brendon wasn’t so wrecked at the time, he would have felt guilty about it.

There was plenty of time for guilt later.

He remembered too much of the first few days of climbing to sobriety and everything from the worst night of his life. He remembered following the soccer captain of a rival school to the guy's car, thinking how hot he was and how excited he was to finally get to make out with a guy. He remembered being pushed against the car door as lips sloppily pressed against his and hands held onto his hips. The second he saw Danny, the kid who spent two years beating him up because Brendon beat him out for a spot in Jazz band, step out of the shadows, Brendon knew he was fucked.

He struggled to get free as the hands on his hips gripped tighter and a knee was forced in between his thighs. Danny helped pin him to the ground, behind the car so even someone walking close by wouldn’t see. When he tried to yell for help, Danny shoved one of his dirty socks in his mouth and kept it there with a strip of duct tape. The cotton was rough against his cheeks and tongue, and it tasted like dirt and sweat. The duct tape chafed at his lips and the skin of his wrists where Danny taped them together.   If he threw up, he’d choke to death. He did his best to force the feeling away.

In the dark, he cried, but refused to beg, or scream, or curse loud enough to be heard past the gag. In his house, coming down hard from the high, curled up on the couch with his head cradled in someone’s lap, he begged and begged, pleading with for the guy to stop.

He never did.

He remembered his bare skin scraping against the ground and the rock that dug into his hip, leaving a long scratch that wouldn’t heal for days. “You wanted this. Don’t pretend you don’t like it,” he remembered the guy saying, and variations thereof, punctuated by sharp groans and grunts hissed into his ear.

But mostly he remembered the pain. He’d nearly broken his ankle several times while skateboarding. And once he cracked a rib. This was an entire new level of pain that started low in his back, dug into his skin all the way to the bone and tore up his spine and into his head, like razor sharp claws slicing into his brain with every cruel thrust. 

And he was forced to lie there and just take it, “like the good little slut you are,” the guy said.

He made himself stop crying then.

Now, he was sobbing into the thigh pressed into his cheek as someone’s hand carded through his hair.

He remembered the guy’s low grunt as he finished, the rustle of his jeans as he pulled them up and the sound of his zipper. Something wet slipped down his thighs. The minute Danny let go of his wrists, he curled onto his side. 

As he kicked Brendon in the stomach and legs over and over again, Danny let lose a short bark of laughter that grew in volume and intensity until he was nearly hysterical.  Then Danny stopped kicking and laughing and started crying. He stumbled away, disappearing completely, and Brendon never saw him again.

Danny’s name appeared in the paper two months later. Death by suicide, the obituary read. Brendon never found out what happened to the guy that raped him. 

Brendon cut away the tape from his wrists with a sharp rock he found on the ground, then peeled the tape and sock from his mouth and pulled his pants up. In the dark, he struggled to his feet just in time to vomit inside the guy’s car on the driver’s seat, the little bit of revenge he could muster at the time.

Now, someone thrust a bucket into his hands as he heaved. A hand rubbed his back as a voice told him to ‘let it all out.’

When he got home, his father asked if he had a good time. Brendon pasted on a smile and said, ‘the best,’ grateful for the black pants and his dimly lit house for hiding the blood and cum he knew stained his pants. Forcing himself not to limp, he held it together just long enough to make it to the bathroom before he was throwing up and crying again.

Someone took the bucket when he finished dry heaving. He kept his eyes closed, breathing deeply until the shaking in his limbs subsided to less frenetic tremors and the tears stopped rolling so quickly down his cheeks. He forced himself to stop crying then, and told himself never again. He kept that promise for almost five years, until that night on Fall Out Boy’s bus. Now he can’t seem to stop.  

Scrubbing violently at his eyes, he finally opened them, and reality blurred into focus. It was the most lucid he’d been in weeks, he realized.

A Gatorade bottle appeared in his line of site. “Rinse and spit,” Zack said, thrusting the bucket into his face and taking it away again after Brendon complied.

Jon was on the couch with him, Zack sitting on a kitchen chair directly in front of him. Spencer was fast asleep in a sleeping bag across the room, and faint retching told him Ryan was in the bathroom. He risked looking up and instantly regret it when he saw the horror splayed across Zack and Jon’s face.  

“B,” Jon said, reaching a hand out towards him that he flinched away from. Jon snatched his hand back as the look on Zack’s face shifted from horror to sympathy.

 ~~~~ _Zack can keep his fucking sympathy,_ he thought, crossing his arms across his chest. _That’s not fair,_ he thought, dropping his arms to his sides. _He just cares._

Jon scooted closer, and when Brendon let him without flinching, Jon swooped in, wrapping an arm around Brendon’s waist and resting his head on Brendon’s shoulder. He pulled a flask out of his sweater and took a long drag, a few drips spilling onto Brendon’s sweaty shoulder. Zack didn’t yell at Jon for it. That’s when Brendon knew.

 _Shit,_ he thought, rubbing his hand across the frayed edges of the basketball shorts he was wearing. He knew this might be a possibility, but exactly how much did he say out loud?

“Enough,” Zack answered and Brendon flinched again. “Brendon,” he said, pulling the chair closer, blocking Brendon from escape, “have you ever talked about this with anyone?”

He picked at a loose thread in his shorts, pulling it loose and tearing it off, before discarding it on the carpet. “No,” he admitted, and then pressed his lips shut. Stupid detox making his stupid lips looser than usual.

Zack thankfully just nodded and walked away, nudging the lump that was Spencer with his foot to make sure he was still alive, before checking on Ryan in the bathroom.

It wasn’t for another two weeks that Zack brought it up again. Ryan left Brendon’s home a few days ago for his own, and Jon left shortly after for Chicago. Spencer was currently camping out in Brendon and Shane’s spare room with no intention of leaving anytime soon, something Brendon was secretly grateful for.

Zack’s deemed it safe to leave, believing Brendon wouldn’t die now or relapse. He was always there for Brendon, because Brendon asked when no one else did. The others were just a bonus. He appreciated the older man’s worry, but Brendon was never going through that shit again. He still couldn’t shake the horror of going through it once.

“Thanks, Zack, I totally knew I was your favorite,” Brendon joked as Zack packed the few items he brought with him into a duffel bag. “Seriously, don’t know how to repay you for this,” he said, painting on his patented smile as Zack hiked his duffle bag on his shoulder.

“I do,” Zack said. Brendon hated the way his pulse quickened. He resisted the urge to take a step back, but just barely, as Zack took a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to him. There was nothing but a phone number and the name ‘Dr. Cas’ written across it. “This is the number for a therapist. I’ve got insider knowledge that he’s really good, and he can do Skype and phone sessions in order to work around your tour schedule. If you really want to pay me back, you’ll go see him.”

Brendon made an aborted movement to hug him, and then remembered Zack didn’t do that shit. But before he could completely shrink back, two strong arms wrapped around him and pulled him close. Hesitantly, he wrapped his own arms around his friend before relaxing into his first ever Zack hug.

Yeah, Brendon definitely owed Zack.

So he made the call.

*

Dr. Cas told him that there was nothing wrong with him, that he didn’t need to get over this quickly. Dr. Cas told him it may have been five years since the incident, but he’d only been actively dealing with it, instead of repressing it, for a short time and that it was perfectly normal that he couldn’t have sex with Spencer. Dr. Cas told him over and over again what happened that night wasn’t his fault.

Dr. Cas told Brendon a lot things he wasn’t sure he believed yet.

“Spencer’s going to leave me eventually,” he told Doctor Cas one day. He was a little bit high, he needed the marijuana to get through these sessions, and he promised Zack, Andy, and Spencer that he would give therapy a try. So he was honest, completely honest with the man, in a way he’d never been with anyone else, not even Spencer. It helped that everything he said here was completely confidential and that Dr. Cas was just one step above being anonymous.

“Why do you say that?” Dr. Cas asked, taking a note on the pad of paper he always kept in front of him.

“Because I can’t have sex with him,” Brendon admitted, leaving off the ‘duh,’ because that would be rude. But really, wasn’t it obvious? “We even, I even tried topping, but it was…too weird,” he finished with a shrug. It wasn’t necessarily a bad experience, and they both came. From Brendon’s perspective, it felt pretty good. But every minute shift in Spencer’s expression made him think, ‘ _I’m hurting him, oh god, I’m hurting him,’_ and afterwards he may have freaked out a little bit. What the guy did to him that night, it _hurt,_ it hurt so bad. For a week after, he nearly cried every time he sat down in the hard wooden chairs at his school or his kitchen table. The day after, after he trudged home from church and found more blood in his underwear, he almost decided to take a bus to the free clinic in Vegas. There was just so much _blood_ and he spent the entire day worrying if he could bleed to death from it.

He just couldn’t imaging it not hurting, no matter how many times Spencer reassured him that he was fine, that it burned a little in the beginning, but he wasn’t in pain, and there was no blood that Brendon could find.

Still, after they finished, he told Spencer he had to take a piss, and then hid in the bathroom, wedged between the toilet and his bathtub, shaking and hyperventilating until his vision turned spotty. Spencer found him a few minutes later, and they both decided it was best if they didn’t try again.

“Do you think a relationship needs to have sex in order to be successful?” Dr. Cas asked.

“I want to make Spencer happy.”

“That’s an important part of any relationship,” Dr. Cas agreed, tapping his pen on his chin, “But it doesn’t answer the question,” he said with a slight smile, pointing his pen at Brendon.

“I…yes?” Brendon answered after a moment’s hesitation.

“Why?”

“I…” Brendon began, but he wasn’t sure how to answer that. Instead he shrugged. “Just, everything is about sex. Why should this be any different?”

“Does Spencer tell you that?” Dr. Cas asked. Brendon quelled the ire his question arose. Spencer was patient. Spencer never asked for more than Brendon could give. Spencer kissed his protests quiet and reminded him over and over and over again that it wasn’t about the sex. But Dr. Cas didn’t know that, he’d never even met Spencer.

Still his vehement ‘No’ in reply was a bit huffy, as he unconsciously crossed his arms. Dr. Cas made a note of that. “Spencer always tells me it’s not about the sex, and if it never happens that’s okay,” he added for good measure, because he wanted Dr. Cas to _like_ his boyfriend.

“Then why do you believe relationships need sex?”

Brendon wanted to ask ‘what do you think?’ But if there was one thing he’d learned in therapy it was that psychiatrists never answer your frigging questions and never give their opinions or advice. Brendon was convinced he’d never actually heard Dr. Cas say anything that wasn’t a question.  

“I don’t know,” Brendon admitted, and it was both true and well, not. There was nothing in his life he could point to and say ‘this is why a relationship needs sex,’ and he had even seen sex ruin relationships, especially Ryan’s when he cheated on whomever he was with at the time. But he also had zero examples of a relationship working without sex. He did not know one single person who had ever been in a long-term relationship that hadn’t led to making love in the bedroom.  Instead, he had plenty of graphic examples of people having sex with their partners or one night stands provided in unfortunate great detail by both drunken and sober friends and acquaintances alike.

“Why don’t you think about it and we’ll talk about it next time. I think it’ll help if you try making a list of reasons why you want to be in a relationship with Spencer.” ~~~~

_Ha! That’s not a question,_ he thought. _Except wait, that was a question, damn._

Brendon had a whole week to think about it, but ended up not. They got so busy working on their new album, that he almost missed his next appointment. It was only Spencer pulling him aside, ushering him into a cab, and bitching out Ryan for protesting that they needed to work _right now_ , that got Brendon to his appointment on time.

Somehow though, despite how busy they got, his list of reasons why he wanted to date Spencer grew every day.

It started with an innocent little bottle of water. He’d been laying down vocals all day for demos, but somehow the supply of water bottles never ran out. It wasn’t until he reached for a bottle, found it was empty, and his boyfriend handed him a new bottle that he realized Spencer had been providing a steady supply without him even noticing.

He started a memo on his phone and wrote, _takes care of me,_ as his number one item on the list tentatively titled “reasons why Spencer is awesome.”

Ryan wanted to cut Folkin’ Around from the CD, because he thought they lyrics were trite.  It wouldn’t have been such a big deal, but Ryan and Jon had pretty much taken over the entire CD, refusing to let Spencer and Brendon have much say in it. Brendon and Spencer found themselves compromising more and more and more on things they really didn’t want to because Ryan and Jon refused to budge.

Brendon was seconds away from agreeing, when Spencer literally grabbed Ryan by the ear and dragged him out of the studio. The argument was loud and long and vicious and Brendon spent the entire time, sitting on the ground, plucking random chords from his guitar and avoiding Jon’s eyes.

In the end, Spencer won. Brendon added _stands up for me_ to his list.

Number three came at night. They’d both fallen asleep on the couch, Brendon curled up on Spencer’s chest, when Spencer woke him up in the middle of the night with a whimper. Brendon pried his eyes open as Spencer shifted restlessly beneath him, eyes screwed shut and breathy whimpers escaping from his parted lips.

He poked Spencer in the side until he woke up. “You were having a nightmare,” Brendon explained when Spencer stared at him in confusion. “Was if the birds again?”

“Yeah,” Spencer admitted after a moment’s pause. “I know it’s stupid, but…”

“It’s not stupid,” Brendon insisted, settling himself further into Spencer’s chest. “Do you want to head to bed, or do you want to play video games?”

“Video games, uh, please, if you don’t mind,” he said, uncharacteristically shy.

They played until the sun rose, until Spencer finally broke down and told him about the dream, about what it was like watching someone die that night.

Brendon offered what comfort he could, and added _he trusts me_ to his list.

In the cab on his way to his next appointment that he only remembered because of Spencer, who kissed him before pushing him into the cab with a fond smile, saying, “I’ll handle Ryan,” Brendon added number four to the list.

_He loves me._

“Did you think about why you believe relationships need sex?” Dr. Cas asked after the obligatory, ‘how are feeling today?’

Brendon shrugged and said ‘no.’

Dr. Cas’s face remained completely neutral, which irritated him.

“I see you brought a sheet of paper with you, though. Is that your list?”

“Yes,” he said, tightening his grip on the piece of paper.

“Would you like to share?”

Reluctantly, he handed over the list to Dr. Cas.

“These are very good reasons,” Dr. Cas says with a soft smile as he handed the sheet back to him. “But I noticed you didn’t add sex to your list.”

Brendon shrugged in response, unsure of what Dr. Cas wanted from him.

“Does not having sex with Spencer bother you?”

Brendon shook his head no, hunching his shoulders and pulling his arms and legs in tighter until he was sitting cross legged on the chair, his hands fisted in his pocket.

“But you think it bothers Spencer?”

Brendon shrugged again, and started fidgeting, leaning forward without realizing it, drawing himself into an even tighter ball.

“Have you ever considered that maybe Spencer’s list of reasons why he wants to be in a relationship with you are the same, or at least similar, to yours? That maybe sex isn’t on his list either?”

Brendon shrugged again.

“Brendon,” Dr. Cas said when the silence stretched on, “do you trust Spencer?”

“I…maybe?”

“Brendon,” Dr. Cas said and he somehow made it seem chiding without insulting him.

“No,” Brendon admitted and turned away from Dr. Cas. “It’s not his fault.”

“It’s not your fault either.”

The expression on Dr. Cas’s face was earnest and open, something so rarely found in the people he usually encountered. “That’s not a question.”

Dr. Cas’s lips tugged at the corners until he was smiling despite himself, something akin to amusement on his face. “No, no it’s not.”

*

Brendon took nearly an hour to get back to the studio. He knew Ryan was probably throwing a fit, but Spencer said he’d take care of it, and Brendon, at the very least, trusted him on that.

He accepted Spencer’s hug when he finally returned, and then dragged him somewhere private. If he didn’t have this conversation now, he’d think about it too much and chicken out.

There were no protests as he grabbed Spencer’s hand and led him away into a random room. Whatever he said to Ryan to appease him earlier must still be working its magic. 

His eyes wandered around the room, taking in the amps sitting on the floor, the guitars lined on the wall, before settling on the keyboard shoved into the corner. “I think I don’t trust you as much as I should,” he said, before he could lose his nerve. He glanced at Spencer long enough to see his face fall, and quickly looked away back at the keyboard. “But I think one day I can, if you’ll wait for me.”

He wasn’t looking at Spencer, when hands grabbed his hips and pulled him forwards with just enough space that Brendon could look up into Spencer’s baby blue eyes. Sliding one hand up to tangle his hair, Spencer kissed his lips softly, but determined. Pulling back, and resting their foreheads together, he said one solitary word.

“Always.”

*

“We broke them,” Patrick said as he stood in the kitchenette in their bus staring blankly into the open fridge.

Joe’s spoon was halfway to his mouth already when he dropped it back into his cereal bowl with a clink. “We kind of did.”

It’d been two weeks since what Pete was refusing to call 'The Incident' even though that’s what Joe, and now Andy, referred to it as every day. Instead of the steady as a rock, happy-go-lucky Jon, they had a man who sat and stared out the windows forlornly. Pete never noticed the flinches before, but now he caught the wince on Ryan’s face almost every day when someone he didn’t know gestured wildly in his direction or Zack reached for him or one of the million other reasons that caused that reaction. Spencer seemed the most well-adjusted, but Pete was there when he froze at sound check, completely checking out from reality. Brendon flat out refused to come near any of them with a 10-foot pole.

 _“It’s because you’re treating him differently_ ,” Ryan had said while smoking up with them last night as a reason why Brendon refused to hang out with them yet again. _“What happened when he was a kid changed him. But he hasn’t changed in the last two weeks just because we know now.”_

 _“He needs help_ ,” Andy had argued, though he knew the drummer really wanted to say, ‘you all do.’

“ _But you’re not going to be the one to give it to him_ ,” Ryan had said, pulling his best bitch face he probably borrowed from Spencer. The kid had a point.

“I blame Joe,” Pete said, snatching the box of cereal from next to Joe and pouring his own.

“Hey! You two are more to blame than I am,” Joe said, pointing his spoon and him and Patrick.

“It’s not about blame,” Andy stumbled into the kitchenette, blindly reaching for the coffee pot and spilling more coffee onto the counter than he poured into his mug.

“Andy’s right,” Patrick said, still staring into the fridge until Pete gently nudged him aside to reach for the milk. “We should fix this. We can’t just break them –,” he cut off with a vague gesture.

“And leave them at the store without paying for them?” Joe finished the thought for him.

“No, yes, you know what I mean,” Patrick huffed and slammed the fridge shut.

An idea suddenly came to Pete. He grinned like the Grinch when he came up with his plan to steal Christmas.

“Oooh, I know that grin,” Joe said.

“No,” Patrick said.

“Yes,” Pete grinned in reply.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Okay, fine.”

That night, Pete switched Panic’s entrance song and watched in amusement from side stage as the kids realized they were entering to Back Streets Back. Then he saw Ryan smirk at Brendon before launching into the chorus, Brendon joining him in harmony. The crowd ended up being super into it.

Panic retaliated by wrapping in seran wrap the entrance to their green room, which Pete fell victim to, the entrance to their bus, which Patrick fell victim to, the toilet on their bus, which Joe fell victim to, and all of Andy’s drums.

Joe and Pete filled their bunks with glitter, which ended up covering their clothing despite how much they cleaned and did their laundry until the end of tour. Zack was not happy. 

Brendon stole all of their guitar strings and wouldn’t give them back until Pete sang a song on stage acappella, a song of Brendon’s choice that might have been a Disney song.  Pete wasn’t the best singer in the world. It was kind of embarrassing.

In retaliation, he stole all of Brendon’s clothes and forced him to go out on stage in his underwear. Even the exhibitionist that he was, Brendon didn’t enjoy that.

But Panic started laughing again, started brain storming convoluted plans to get back at them, stopped avoiding their presence and started living tour life to fullest.

They were still broken. But like Ryan said, it wasn’t up to him to fix them. Pete likes to think, at the very least, they were on the path to mend.

And that would have to be enough.


End file.
